Metula

Metula occupies a hill at the northern end of the Hula Valley, with views toward Mount Hermon and southern Lebanon.[1][5] It lies at the northern tip of the Galilee Panhandle, approximately 10 kilometers north of Kiryat Shmona, and is Israel’s northernmost community within its pre-1967 boundaries.[6][7] Lebanese territory borders it on the north, east, and west, while its road access comes from the south.[8] Nearby Lebanese villages include Kafkila, Khiam, and Deir Mimas; some of Metula’s homes face directly toward Lebanon.[5]

The town combines the surviving fabric of a Baron-era agricultural colony with newer residential neighborhoods.[8][2] Old stone houses and early Jewish-built homes remain along its historical main street.[8][2] Fruit farming and tourism became its principal livelihoods, linking the surrounding orchards to a townscape of small hotels, guesthouses, restaurants, and visitor attractions.[9] Its border setting has supported periods of cross-border agricultural and commercial activity, but has also exposed homes, farms, and public facilities to attacks and prolonged disruption.[4][1]

Metula was founded on May 17, 1896, through the support of Baron Edmond de Rothschild, on land previously occupied by the Druze village Al-Mutalla or Umtalla.[2] The earlier name has been translated as “the lookout” or “overlooking the surroundings,” reflecting the site’s elevated position.[2][1] An account of the town’s naming says its name was initially written “Matula,” before local leaders adopted “Metula” to avoid an unwanted morbid association with the earlier form.[8]

Rothschild purchased the land from a resident of Sidon, identified elsewhere as a Lebanese Christian.[1][10] The new settlement initially contained 59 families, mostly from Zichron Ya’akov and Rishon LeZion.[2] Its pioneers belonged to the First Aliyah settlement enterprise and sought to extend the northern boundary of Jewish settlement; the venture was remote and lacked nearby urban support.[1] A historical glossary also identifies immigrants from Russia among its founders.[6] Many of its adult male residents were young men who had previously worked in other agricultural colonies or were children of colonists elsewhere.[11]

The settlement was one of Rothschild’s northern agricultural foundations and formed an isolated Jewish outpost in Galilee.[12] Its establishment helped secure access to water sources and defined the northern extent of the Jewish settlement network of the period.[13] By 1929, an almost uninterrupted chain of Jewish towns and villages extended from Metula southward to Be’er Tuvia.[13]

Early agriculture centered on cereals, including wheat, while tobacco was also cultivated.[12][11] The colony’s recorded landholding comprised 1,092 hectares, or 2,730 acres.[11] Unlike some other agricultural settlements, early Metula had neither vineyards nor orange plantations.[12] The amount of land available per family was considered insufficient for grain farming, a problem also identified at the southern settlement of Kastinieh.[12] In 1899, fifteen of Metula’s sixty families were transferred to other colonies to address this imbalance, reducing the population of an already exposed outpost.[12]

At the end of 1899, agricultural colonies whose titles were registered in Edmond de Rothschild’s name passed to the management of the Jewish Colonization Association of London.[11] Metula belonged to the group of agricultural colonies established under Rothschild’s sponsorship during this period.[11][12] A spring at the settlement’s entrance supplied its water in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, before eventually falling into disuse.[14]

A Jerusalem Post opinion article reconstructs two episodes of flight and abandonment in 1920: an initial flight in January after a failed French military operation against Bedouin forces, followed by another abandonment after the fall of Tel Hai in March.[15] It places Metula alongside Hamara, Kfar Giladi, and Tel Hai and says that 30 farmers returned in October 1920.[15]

In early 1921, British officer Stuart Newcombe and French officer Maurice Paulet marked the Palestine–Lebanon boundary from the Mediterranean to Al-Hamma with 71 stone cairns. The line underwent later refinements, including re-marking during World War II after surveyors found errors in the earlier demarcation.[16]

For residents, the new line did not immediately end older patterns of movement and land use.[4] During the 1920s, the border often existed primarily on paper: Metula farmers crossed into Lebanon to cultivate land they owned there and paid taxes to the Lebanese government.[4] They continued farming Lebanese land until Lebanon revoked permission, while the border remained largely open through the 1950s.[4]

The broader Mandate-era region also supported relatively open travel between Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria.[3] Merchandise crossed between them, Ottoman-built railways connected places across the region, and Jewish and Arab residents of Mandatory Palestine visited their northern neighbors.[3] Metula’s hotels participated in this regional tourism economy, even as local operators encouraged holidaymakers to spend their money closer to home.[3]

After the War of Independence, the Israel–Lebanon Armistice Agreement of March 23, 1949, set the international boundary as the armistice line.[16] Maps preserve successive stages of the area’s administrative geography: a topographic sheet titled Metulla was issued in the Palestine Survey series in May 1947, and Israel’s Department of Survey published a Metulla map in 1951 using an English-language 1947 Mandate-era base map and showing the Green Line as the armistice demarcation line.[17][18]

The Good Fence crossing lay just west of Metula, and its name originated in 1976 when a Lebanese child was permitted to enter Israel for medical treatment.[10] From 1977, Israel allowed hundreds of mainly Maronite Christian Lebanese to cross daily for work through Good Fence crossings, including Fatma Gate opposite Metula.[9] These arrangements followed an earlier period in which Metula residents had themselves crossed into Lebanon to farm in the Ayoun Valley.[9] The Good Fence ended after Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000.[9]

In December 2018, the Israel Defense Forces discovered a Hezbollah tunnel in an apple orchard outside Metula.[19] The military assessed that it was likely one of several tunnels, and six tunnels extending into Israel were subsequently exposed.[19] The discovery added an underground dimension to the security challenges facing the town’s farms and residential neighborhoods.[19]

A 2026 Jerusalem Center for Foreign and Security Affairs analysis characterizes Metula as one of a group of frontline communities affected since October 2023 by anti-tank guided missiles, short-range rockets, mortars, and UAVs.[16] Its assessment describes damage to property and infrastructure and prolonged evacuations involving tens of thousands of people across the affected border communities, rather than supplying Metula-specific totals.[16]

Most of Metula’s approximately 2,000 residents evacuated after fighting on the northern front began in October 2023.[1][20] By May 2024, more than 150 anti-tank missiles had been fired toward the town from Lebanon, in addition to rockets and mortar shells.[20] At that stage, approximately 35% of homes had sustained some damage, and many were no longer habitable.[20] In one severely exposed neighborhood, a house was struck by four Kornet missiles in about 75 seconds, while four houses below it were also hit.[20] Guest accommodation and an older hotel on HaRishonim Street were damaged, and the mayor visited evacuated residents to inform them when their homes had been destroyed.[20]

On October 31, 2024, Hezbollah rocket fire killed five people in an agricultural area near Metula.[21] The victims were four Thai workers and one Israeli.[5] A December visit found the town largely deserted, with only a handful of people having remained during the war.[5] Resident Arie Almog showed homes that had escaped damage as well as others bearing rocket or shrapnel damage; tanks had also damaged parts of the town.[5] Flowers and plants remained alive at his home, while two tractors stood in the street, one with flat tires, and houses retained signs of their residents’ abrupt departure.[5]

Later reporting described substantially wider destruction: more than 2,200 rockets and missiles had targeted Metula, more than 70% of houses had been damaged, and approximately 120 homes had been destroyed.[1] Schools, health facilities, electricity and water systems, and roads also suffered severe damage.[1] An October 2025 assessment used a different measure, reporting that approximately 60% of homes and municipal buildings had been badly damaged or destroyed during nearly fourteen months of fighting.[22]

Reconstruction proceeded alongside a slow and uneven return.[22][23] By October 2025, roads had been repaired and most damaged homes had either been restored or were undergoing renovation.[23] Educational recovery remained difficult: one kindergarten had reopened, but the elementary school destroyed by rocket fire remained closed.[22] Another account described insufficient pupil numbers and children traveling to Kfar Giladi for schooling.[23] Some families remained hesitant to return because of Hezbollah’s continued presence near the border and fears of renewed attacks.[24]

Renewed fighting again disrupted daily life in March 2026, when approximately 50 families evacuated and about 700 residents took temporary breaks away from the community.[25] By July, public events, guided visits, guesthouses, and community activities were resuming after a prolonged period in which walking around the colony had been dangerous.[8] Reconstruction continued in October 2026, with businesses and hotels reopening or undergoing renovation and plans advancing for 76 homes in the Har Tzfiya neighborhood.[2]

Metula had 233 residents in 1898, two years after its establishment.[11] Its population remained below 1,000 for many years, until the founding of Tel-Hai College near Kiryat Shmona.[22] An undated reference description gives an approximate population of 1,100, while reports concerning the period immediately before the October 2023 fighting commonly describe a community of about 2,000.[10][1]

Wartime displacement makes later figures measures of return as much as of population size.[22][23] In September 2025, 48% of Metula’s residents had returned, compared with 87% of evacuated residents across northern Israel overall.[24] An October 2025 count recorded 920 returnees out of 1,905 people living in the town on October 6, 2023, likewise approximately 48%.[23] Another October report placed the population at 40% of its prewar level.[22]

Reports in March and July 2026 put the proportion returned at approximately 60%, although the March account used a smaller prewar baseline of 1,200 residents.[25][8] By October 2026, approximately 60% of the roughly 2,400 people registered as Metula residents were physically living there.[2] These figures refer to different dates and distinguish, in some cases, between registered residents, people present before the war, and those actually living in the town during recovery.[2][23]

Fruit farming and tourism were identified in 2007 as Metula’s two principal sources of livelihood, with orchards extending for 25 kilometers along the border.[9] Its agricultural landscape includes orchards and olive groves, while its visitor economy developed guest rooms, guesthouses, hotels, galleries, workshops, restaurants, and cafés.[26] Farms, orchards, and tourism remained economic mainstays in reporting from 2025, even as wartime destruction interrupted their operation.[22]

Hotel tourism has a history extending to the early twentieth century.[9] Metula’s first hotel, the Snow of the Lebanon, was built in 1911; the Alaska Inn later occupied its site.[9] During the Mandate period, a hotel named “The Snows of Lebanon,” or Sheleg-HaLevanon, appealed to local holidaymakers to stay in Metula rather than spend money abroad.[3] Such appeals formed part of a tourism economy affected by economic hardship; some hotels in the wider setting went bankrupt during the early stages of the 1936–1939 Arab revolt.[3]

A proposed master plan reported in 2012 covered 9,400 dunams and was intended to guide development through 2040.[27] It provided for 314 additional housing units, a further future addition of 600 units, and 2,665 tourist accommodation units.[27] The proposal sought to conserve landscape and natural values, the Iyon Stream reserve, and surrounding agricultural land, while converting some centrally located agricultural land to housing and improving connections between newer neighborhoods and the original colony.[27]

The postwar recovery of tourism lagged behind physical repairs.[22][23] In October 2025, only one of the five hotels on the main street had reopened, and the Canada Center sports complex was undergoing repair.[22] Businesses and tourism were beginning to recover, but agriculture and educational services continued to face serious difficulties.[23] By July 2026, guesthouses, businesses, and public activities were again welcoming visitors.[8]

One distinctive cultural enterprise was the private musical-instrument collection of resident Zami Ravid, comprising approximately 400 instruments, including keyboard instruments from dozens of countries.[8] He had hosted about 35,000 visitors for performances and presentations in his home.[8] A Burkan rocket destroyed the house, after which the collection was evacuated for treatment and repair; approximately 300 instruments were saved.[8]

HaRishonim Street is the original colony’s first street, with 58 houses identified in a 2026 account as homes of the founding families.[8] Its surviving buildings preserve the architectural character of early Metula alongside later development.[5] The council building formerly housed Rothschild’s officials.[2] Described in 2026 as 129 years old, it has been identified as Israel’s oldest municipal building.[8]

Ma’ayan Park, at the entrance to town, occupies the site of the spring that supplied early Metula.[14] After the spring fell into disuse, the Jewish National Fund developed the area into a park with canals, footbridges, and flowing water.[14] Other attractions include the Iyon Stream, the Tannur waterfall, a farmers’ museum, and a lookout over southern Lebanon and the Hula Valley.[26] A guided route described in 2026 also included a new promenade above the Iyon Stream and a Roman bridge.[8]

The Canada Center is a sports and tourism complex with a swimming pool and ice rink.[10] The complex was undergoing repairs in October 2025, making its restoration part of the wider effort to revive Metula’s tourism and community life.[22]

The acquisition and subsequent use of land around Metula involved disputes with earlier residents and neighboring communities.[12][14] Local tenants opposed Rothschild’s purchase, and the new farmers subsequently encountered difficulties.[14] An early twentieth-century account describes Druze neighbors disputing Rothschild’s title, despite his having paid twice, and reports incursions by roving Bedouin groups; those details rest on that historical account rather than independent corroboration in the available material.[12]

A later local-tour account describes 4,000 dunams in the Iyon Valley as having been divided among founding families and subsequently expropriated.[8] This is a reported land-tenure narrative, not an independently adjudicated determination of ownership or the circumstances of the land’s transfer.[8]