ISRAEL – With one year left until graduation, 17-year-old Ziv Zinger hopes to begin the academic year on September 1 like other students across Israel. But that hope remains uncertain for him and others from the country’s Northern District, who are grappling with the reality of displacement as Israel’s conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon drags on without resolution.

He is among more than a thousand students who, before the October 7 war, attended the Har VaGai Regional High School in the Dafna kibbutz (agricultural commune), less than two miles from the border with Lebanon. The school was forced to shut when Israel ordered border communities to evacuate as the Israeli military and Hezbollah began exchanging fire. Just last month, a rocket burst through the empty school’s gym.

Some 62,000 Israelis have been displaced from their homes in the north of the country since the evacuation order almost a year ago. Zinger said he feels “cheated” by not being able to return to his school in Dafna. After October 7, schools shut for a month, he said, after which students spent the rest of the academic year in hybrid learning that alternated between online classes and other school locations.

“(I) feel very connected to the old school,” he told CNN. Students had access to “grass, a river flowing through the school. It was very open.” Hezbollah said its attacks are in response to Israel’s war in Gaza, which was launched after Hamas-led militants attacked the country on October 7, killing 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostages, according to Israeli authorities. The war has killed more than 40,600 people in Gaza, according to the health ministry there.

The Israel-Hezbollah crossfire extending several kilometers into both countries’ territory, along with the subsequent evacuation order in Israel, has impacted more than 16,000 Israeli students, the country’s ministry of education said. (CNN)…[+]