US Secretary of State Antony Blinken framed what is happening in the North in jarring terms on Monday. "You have 60,000 or so Israelis who have been forced from their homes in northern Israel," he said at Washington's Brookings Institute. "Israel effectively of the country because people don't feel safe going to their homes.
" The reason this was so jarring is because the last nine months of war -- both in Gaza and a low-intensity war on the northern border -- have habituated Israelis to certain realities, one of them being that towns, moshavim and kibbutzim along the Lebanese border are deserted. The public hears the numbers of residents , hears them relate their hardships in the media, feels horrible about the situation and commiserates and empathizes with the residents but -- for the most part -- chalks it up as yet another casualty of October 7 and the war that followed. What's truly at stake is not necessarily considered.
But the way Blinken framed the situation was stark: Israel has lost sovereignty over a strip of its territory. No less. If a country's residents cannot live in their homes in a particular region of the country because of security threats, then that country has lost its sovereignty -- defined as supreme power or authority over a territory -- over that territory.
And that is very significant. According to a Yediot Ahronot report on Tuesday, 1,023 homes, public buildings and infrastructure facilities have been hit by rockets, drones and missiles from Lebano.
