For Many Israelis, a Bitter Homecoming

Lahyani, who had left Kiryat Shemona with her three children during the fighting, said her Mon Cheri cafe lost its crucial summer business, when thousands of tourists typically come to the cooler hills of northern Israel.

"Usually, at this time, you have to wait a week for a table" at her restaurant, she said. The government will reimburse her about $2,500 for her losses; she figures she lost closer to $25,000. "For businesses like us, the war is just beginning," she said. "I don't think we can survive."

Across town, in a bleak stand of block-style apartments normally filled with immigrants sent here by the government, David Biton, 44, drew hard on a cigarette as he waited for the government assessors to look at the damage to his place. The tobacco smoke fought the foul odor of rotting trash. Outside his apartment, a chunk of asphalt was missing and the burned hulk of a car offered testimony of a Katyusha rocket's fall.

All but an estimated 3,000 of Kiryat Shemona's 24,000 residents had left. Biton had stayed. It was "like a Warsaw ghetto. It was a catastrophe," he said. Beneath his building, a few residents had huddled in the claustrophobia-inducing concrete shelter until the tension drove them out. A child's painted handprints were the only sign of cheer left in the place. Affixed to the shelter's steel door was a sticker, handed out early in the conflict by a newspaper company: "We will win," it boasted in patriotic blue.

"This war didn't do anything," Biton said, waving the cigarette in disgust. "We lost over 100 soldiers. . . . What did we do? We failed."

More civilians were killed in Lebanon, he acknowledged, but he noted that Israel had dropped leaflets in Lebanon, telling residents to leave before the attacks.

"I didn't get any leaflet from Hasan Nasrallah," he said, referring to Hezbollah's leader.

In Metula, Yitzak Ben-Nun, a 42-year-old factory worker, watched much of the fighting from his manicured and watered lawn overlooking a valley into Lebanon. "It was like a war movie," he said, but one with a bad ending.

"Hezbollah is like a cancer in Lebanon," he said. "We didn't get rid of it. We just pushed it around a bit."

Others tried to assess the conflict in a more positive way. "We didn't lose. But we didn't win, like we did in 1967," said an army major who gave his name only as Chi. He stood on a hilltop in Metula and looked toward the rocky hills of Lebanon, now devoid of Israeli soldiers in this area.

"We thought when we withdrew from Lebanon six years ago, everything would be fine. It wasn't," he said. "Was it worth the price? I don't know." He shrugged. "Time will tell."

Haim Barbibay, the mayor of Kiryat Shemona, said more than 30 percent of the buildings in town had been damaged by more than 1,000 Hezbollah shells. But he said that if Israel had not responded to Hezbollah's seizing of two soldiers on July 12, the consequences would have increased.

"We had no choice but to do this war," the mayor said in the city cemetery, his voice low under the mourners' wailing that continued after Amar's funeral. "We should have done it three years ago. If not now, it would have been even worse later."

Special correspondent Tal Zipper contributed to this report.