In normal times, the hills of Northern Galilee fill with tourists, some of them pilgrims seeking out the places where Jesus walked 2,000 years ago. Today those hills are burning. It is in Galilee that the rockets fired by Hizballah militants in Lebanon typically fall, occasionally scoring a direct hit on someone vulnerable, more often forcing inhabitants to move into bomb shelters. In the escarpment hamlet of Shomera, Israelis like Gabriel Peretz, the owner of a bed-and-breakfast, can do little more than brace for the next attack. "The situation is very bad," he says, his sentences punctuated by the sound of Israeli artillery fire, a crack-boom followed by a lingering zing of the outgoing shell, as loudspeakers in the village instruct residents to take cover in hardened shelters. "We've had six years of peace," he says, "but everything has come back to us."
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