Nationalist fervour, anxiety and indifference in Israel's north

Northern Israel and occupied Golan Heights - A loud bang echoes through Kiryat Shmona, an Israeli town near the Lebanese border that has all but become a ghost town in recent weeks.

A young Israeli soldier flicking through his phone at a traffic stop nonchalantly looks up. A small puff of smoke can be seen over a lush, tree-lined hill.

The locals go about their errands with semiautomatic rifles slung over a shoulder or a pistol wrapped around one of their thighs.

Erez, a straight-talking shop owner, estimates that around half the town has left, leaving the place with "no life".

She has only opened her store to socialise with those who have stayed behind. She motions to her friend, Talia, who is sitting on a stool outside the shopfront and who, like others from Kiryat Shmona, only wanted to give her first name. Behind them, rows of mannequins draped in denim face out onto a dusty, sun-drenched courtyard.

On October 7, the armed wing of the Palestinian group Hamas launched a surprise attack on southern Israel. Israel has responded with a near-constant aerial bombardment of the Gaza Strip and cut off water, power and fuel supplies to the 2.3 million people who live inside the Palestinian enclave.

Since then, tensions on the Lebanon-Israel border have flared between Israeli forces and the Iran-backed group Hezbollah and Palestinian factions operating in Lebanon.

Both sides have exchanged fire. A Reuters videographer, Issam Abdallah, was killed last week when Israel fired artillery across the border.

The Israeli military has claimed it has been targeting fighters attempting to enter its territory.

The community is abuzz with rumours that Hezbollah has attempted to kidnap locals.

Erez says she has heard of three such attempts, Talia almost a dozen, but they both agree that everyone is worried.

People have invested heavily, Erez says, in building concrete bunkers; they all have permission to carry weapons from the government, but still, many have chosen to evacuate.

A sense of fervent nationalism is palpable; all the remaining locals appear prepared to fight.

Linoy, a young, shy hospitality worker, says she no longer has a job because the local tourism industry has stopped due to the war. Her parents left the country, so she is alone at home, only venturing out to walk her small dog. On Friday, after a heavy cross-border exchange of fire, Israel on said it would evacuate residents from Kiryat Shmona.

One of the few places that remains a hub of activity is a police station with stony-faced uniformed officers eyeing strangers with suspicion through the gated grounds.

On the outskirts of Kiryat Shmona at a shiny, modern shopping centre, men in military clothing load a pick-up truck with boxes that appear to be from a hardware store. Palm trees bend in the wind as the noise of countless flapping Israeli flags fills the near-empty parking lot.

Tanks, military light utility vehicles and speeding police cars fill the narrow roads that snake along the foothills that surround Mount Hermon to the east of Kiryat Shmona.

The views of rolling green hills that give way to more mountainous terrain are interspersed with seemingly impromptu checkpoints. Once vehicles are allowed to pass, little attention is paid to the speed limit.

Soldiers peer into car windows outside a sprawling Israeli military base perched on a steep valley, where soldiers live in white plastic trailers.

In Mas'ada, a sleepy village in the occupied Golan Heights in northern Israel, young boys shout and laugh as they do wheelies on their bikes.

The Golan Heights, a 1,200 square kilometre (463 square mile) plateau, is Syrian territory that Israel occupied in 1967 after the Six-Day War, before annexing it in 1981, a move the United Nations Security Council unanimously condemned.

The locals are mainly Syrian Druze, some with Israeli citizenship including everyone Al Jazeera spoke to, and Arabic can be heard on every corner.

There are around 120,000 adherents of the Druze religion, an offshoot of Ismaili Shia Islam, in 22 villages across northern Israel. There are also 800,000 Druze in Syria and around 450,000 in Lebanon.

Kiran, a man in his 20s who only wanted to give his first name due to the current tensions, whiles away the late afternoon on a sofa outside his fast food shop joking around with his friends Weam and Julian.

With a shrug of his shoulders, Kiran says rockets and missiles have hit the area in the past. Since October 7, there have been more strikes around the village where he lives near the border with Lebanon.

Kiran whips out his phone excitedly and pulls up a near-miss captured by accident. In the video, he is seen joking with friends in what appears to be a field before a loud explosion is heard and the camera shakes violently.

He laughs it off. People go out less now, Kiran and his friends say, but no one is particularly afraid.

Unlike the Israeli town several kilometres away, the Druze community appears relatively detached from the Israel-Gaza war.

In Majdal Shams, a scenic Druze town, Amara Abu Saleh, a 23-year-old liquor shop assistant, explains in Arabic that the Druze community is "very closed", meaning that they have largely stayed out of taking sides.

"We don't hate anyone," she says. "Here, everything is fine," she adds as she looks out over the surrounding landscape at dusk, glimmering with lights from the houses scattered across the foothills of Mount Hermon.

Deep in the valley, children play football on a series of large pitches. Many of their parents can watch from balconies in the hills above. A boy, with the name of the Egyptian player Mohamed Salah emblazoned on his back, commands all the attention with a series of acrobatic saves.

Milad Sabag, an erudite 24-year-old university student, takes a long drag from a roll-up cigarette in his vertiginous, modest Majdal Shams apartment.

Surrounded by books, musical instruments and photography equipment, he begins to unpack what he describes as a complicated "identity crisis" that the village is going through.

He describes it as a conflicted community, with some saying it is important to support the Israeli military, whilst others say it is important to support Palestine.

He explains that the Druze community in Israel, which feels rejected by the Syrian regime, is wrestling between the economic comfort Israel provides while retaining an empathetic view of resistance embodied by Palestinians.

For many in the Druze community, he says there is a certain loyalty to Israel, because although they remain "occupied", the Israeli state offers "stability".

However, others, like himself, are nostalgic for a time when the village was more "austere", he says, and less attracted to a consumerist lifestyle.

"I think this change is not just happening in Majdal Shams," he explains. "I also see it in Palestinian villages where people go from just living, like playing next to olive trees and apple trees or whatever, to kind of now, you're going to make money to get a better car."

Many in Majdal Shams view the current war as "political" and say they do not take sides.

Despite this, many of the men in the town serve in the Israeli military.

In Israel, the Druze minority is seen as separate from other Arabic-speaking communities due to their distinct ethno-religious identity.

Many Druze have reached high positions in the Israeli military and have been used as a point of contact with other Arabic-speaking populations.

In the town's main square, a soldier drives a golf cart up and down the area, loud Arabic music blaring from enormous speakers.

In a snooker club, dozens of men wearing T-shirts emblazoned with logos associated with the Israeli security forces sit watching a football match on a large screen, surrounded by a dense cloud of cigarette smoke.

Amara says she knows many soldiers serving in the Israeli army. "Sometimes," she says, "I lie in bed at night thinking about them and [I] can't get to sleep."

Update, 20/10/2023: This story has been updated to reflect Israel saying Friday that it would evacuate Kiryat Shmona.