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				All Citizens, Please Stay In Your Bunkers

By Phil Reeves in Kiryat Shemona, Independent, UK

9 February 2000

All was deathly quiet, even outside the usually bustling Burger King, pride of the neighbourhood shopping mall. Then there was a cheerful electronic ding-dong and a disembodied voice floated across the rooftops. "All citizens, stay in your bunkers. Stay in your bunkers."

The sun shone on Kiryat Shemona yesterday, but it was a community preparing for the worst. More than half the Israeli town's 24,000 residents have fled south, anxious to get out of the range of Hizbollahrockets that have pounded this scrappy border town more often than any other.

Most of those left behind, bracing themselves for the reply to Israel's wave of air strikes on the Lebanon on Monday night, were the weaklings, the ones without cars in which to flee, or relatives to go to.

Valentina Lyoginki, 50, said: "We are the hostages here. We are the ones that get killed while they play their political games." She was standing in a concrete underground bunker. Half a dozen others were with her. For hours they waited for a counter-attack.

Yesterday Ehud Barak, Israel's beleaguered premier, dropped in to Kiryat Shemona, to beef up morale, which was last night battered anew with the death of another Israeli soldier in Lebanon -- the sixth in less than a fortnight. But his visit meant nothing to the group in the bunker.

"See what happens here?" Mrs Lyoginki continued: "The Israelis rally around us at election time, but the bombs start falling, we are left here on our own. But they are the ones I really fear for," she gestured, tearful now, at her two daughters.

In Metula, five miles up the road, Ayal Amos, a 25-year-old restaurateur, was one of few people on the streets. The rest of the 2,000 residents had left or taken heed of the public address warnings by bolting themselves away in their personal bunkers, behind the shutters of their expensive villas.

They live 200 yards from the border, on the edge of the battlefield, yet this is a pocket of prosperity, Stratford-upon-Avon in miniature on a Swiss landscape. No one thinks about the Arab villages, two miles away unless they have to.

Mr Amos was born here. He sees this place, with its souvenir shops, fruit orchards, and cedar avenues, as his home turf. He won't leave unless he has to. He admits that day may come; if Israel withdraws unilaterally from south Lebanon, the Hizbollah could, literally, be a stone's throw away. But it may not be stones.

To notice the paraphernalia of war takes a minute or two: the elevated loudspeakers sprouting over the roofs, the underground army bunker, the huge yellow electric gate that marks the town's entrance, the watchtower.

You can hear it, too, after a while. From time to time, there's a thump of high explosive over the horizon. Unseen Israeli jets rumble overhead. "It's been like this for many years," said Ruben Weinberg, 46, the proprietor of the Alaska Hotel. "People have learnt to live with it."

From time to time, visitors ask him why he doesn't leave, but he replies with a story. "My wife's father used to ask me that question. He lived in Tel Aviv. You know what happened to him? He was killed in 1991 by an Iraqi Scud missile fired by Saddam Hussein. You see! This is Israel; you can't escape these things."