The smell of fire hangs heavy in the air after rockets hit a holiday let surrounded by cherry trees in Metula just one day earlier. The bedroom burned to a crisp leaving what had been the king-size bed a twisted shamble.
"Here try a cherry," Metula Mayor David Azulay says as he reaches up to pick the ripe fruit off the tree. "You in the country's center have no idea how wonderful it tastes."
He came to inspect the damage right after the rocket strike and called the owners to brief them on the situation. "This is a sad part of my job, calling my residents who were evacuated, to tell them about the damage to their property," he says. "The owner told me she had kept a key on the windowsill but there is no longer a window there."
He says sometimes they are just thankful that no one was hurt and sometimes they cry. It's hard to hear them cry after everything they owned was destroyed.
Azulay had had to make many such calls since the war began in October. More than 150 anti-tank missiles were fired from Lebanon at the small border town, not to mention the rockets and mortar shells. Approximately 35% of the homes there have been damaged to some extent or other. Many are damaged beyond repair.
We drove through the streets and stopped near a large home with a tractor parked outside. The house had been hit by a missile, but the tractor was spared. "This neighborhood is targeted most often," he says pointing at the houses up the hill. "That one over there took four Kornet missiles in less than two minutes and the four in the row below were also hit by missiles as was the hotel on the main road.
Tevia Neistein, a member of the local security team was in his kitchen when a missile exploded in his bedroom. "That's that," he said when we met in the command center, "The house is gone. Only a pile of dust and stones is left." He is a tour guide but now he is on reserves and the tourists are gone.
It's not just the destruction. It’s the desolation. The once-manicured gardens are covered in dry weeds and some roads are blocked off with barbed wire, put there to slow Hezbollah's elite Radwan force, who are not very far away, if they infiltrate.
As Efi, the photographer steps out of the car to take some pictures, Azulay urges him to be quick. "We are exposed to fire from the El Khiam village across the border, he warns. "You see those houses there? Anyone in them can see you."
It is scary but more than that it is sad. Metula was founded 128 years ago at the very tip of the Upper Galilee region. Flanked by Lebanon's villages on three sides. It is a symbol of Zionism, now deserted.
Most of its 2,000 residents had been evacuated when the war began and only the security team, a handful of farmers and the mayor remain. "I am a mayor of no one," Azulay says. I've had enough. I want my residents to bug me about garbage collection or street lighting, like any other mayor."
His home is in the area often under attack so he sleeps at the command center. He is a veteran of 25 years of service in the IDF, divorced, and a father of four who was raised in Kiryat Shmona, the city down the road, which is also under constant attack.
One of his sons is a commander in the reserves and is now fighting in Gaza. "He was stationed here in the north before they were deployed to Jabaliya and every time I called to check on him he would tell me I was embarrassing him with my worries." Azulay's youngest is also in the service and is now in the IDF's officer's school. He was at home when the war broke out recovering from an injury. In the fighting that day, 30 soldiers in his platoon were killed. The two girls are both at university.
Azulay says 10% of Metula residents have already decided not to return and he will not even try to convince them otherwise. "What can I promise them? Nothing," he says. "In the past couple of weeks, the fire has increased considerably, and now the mortars are causing brushfires. We take it and take it, but the government does nothing. Our leaders are all talk but I want to see action. I want 50 homes destroyed on the other side for each one here. How come the airport in Beirut is operating as usual while we can't even access our own homes?"
So will your children have to fight against Lebanon as well? I ask, "this is our reality," he says. "We have no other country and I have no other home."