Before Oct. 7, Sigal Malachi would wake up at 5 a.m. each day to water her plants, remove weeds, and produce cuttings. The co-owner of a greenhouse in northern Israel, she said her home was once a lush paradise.
Now, it's a war zone.
Like others living close to the Lebanon border, Malachi is one of what the Israeli government estimates are tens of thousands of Israelis uprooted from their homes because of the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. Forced to shutter her family business, Malachi packed her belongings and left Moshav Liman, an agricultural community in northern Israel on the Mediterranean coast, only a few miles south of the Lebanon border.
Hezbollah, an Iran-backed Lebanese militia group, began launching near-daily rocket attacks on northern Israel on Oct. 8, the day after the Iran-allied Palestinian militant group Hamas led an unprecedented incursion from the Gaza Strip into neighboring southern Israel, igniting the war. Hezbollah has said it is striking Israel in solidarity with Palestinians and won't stop until there is a cease-fire in Hamas-ruled Gaza, where an ongoing air and ground assault by the Israeli military has caused widespread devastation.
In Israel, at least 1,200 people were killed and 6,900 others injured by Hamas and other Palestinian militants during the Oct. 7 attack, according to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). In Gaza, more than 38,000 people have been killed and 87,000 others wounded by Israeli forces since Oct. 7, according to the territory's Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health. Meanwhile, Israel and Hezbollah have exchanged cross-border fire as tensions have escalated in the region.
On June 12, Hezbollah fired hundreds of rockets into northern Israel, the largest attack on the country since the war in Gaza began. The group said it was in retaliation for an Israeli airstrike that killed one of its senior commanders in southern Lebanon.
Malachi, a 46-year-old mother of two, is one of an estimated 60,000 people who, for their own safety, have been evacuated from northern Israel in the face of the Hezbollah rocket attacks, according to the Israeli government.
But the attacks have also brought with them an environmental cost, in the form of thousands of acres of wildfires.
"It's dangerous, it's coming next to the houses," Malachi told ABC News of the fires. "Even if it's not coming to the houses, it's killing forests and it's killing all the life on the ground."
He said the fire ruins vegetation, harms soil quality, and burns small animals that cannot easily escape, including lizards, rodents, snails, and invertebrates.
"As we progress, the effects of the fire are more severe," Shkedy said. "The soil itself is getting burned sometimes – cooked. It's like in the oven, and then it's becoming infertile for quite a while."
He warned that after a hot, dry summer, September and October could be highly dangerous.
"Right now we have four times more fires than we have every year," Shkedy said. "It is bad now, and it's going to be worse toward the autumn."
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