Now Israel is at war with Hizbollah, Kfar Kila is at the very front of the front line. The olive trees on the ridge above the village have been scorched black by the phosphorus flares Israeli soldiers used last week to set them aflame. Buildings have been smashed and ruined, set on fire. Some are stained with blood.

Farm animals, kept in sheds and yards behind the bigger houses, have been injured by the shrapnel from tank shells, which scream in with a jarring, lethal regularity. Ibrahim Yahia, a 26-year-old farmer and part-time defender of Kfar Kila, leads us to a Friesian cow, blinded in one eye by shrapnel. Blood streams from one nostril. As Yahia tries to take its muzzle and comfort it, the animal is spooked, and bucks and kicks.

But nothing appears to spook Yahia. A member of Amal, the group fighting alongside Hizbollah in the Islamic Resistance, he barely flinches as the Israeli shells crash in. The streets are open on one side to observation from the gunners around Metula. 'If they want to come, they'll come,' he said sombrely, showing off the rubble in his parents' house, where a shell had punched a hole through the wall. 'Then we will fight them.'

...

'I won't fight without a reason. But because I have a reason I will fight. Because this is my land, I am prepared to die for it. How could you stay silent when you see your land burn and your children get killed? The whole population here is now resisting.'