Six years after the Second Lebanon War standing at the site of Hizbullah’s July 12 2006 attack on an IDF patrol still leaves Avi Krempa with an empty pit in his stomach. The sleepless nights Krempa the 58-year-old mayor of the Ma’ale Yosef Regional Council has endured since 2006 have come not so much from thoughts about the war but rather the notion that the IDF “fell asleep at the wheel.”

“For three weeks leading up to the attack the army suspected that Hizbullah was planning an attack so they halted border patrols in the area to prevent a kidnapping. But the terrorists had been monitoring IDF radio communications and patrol movements for weeks and they were able to spring into action when the patrols resumed. They hid in the forest for at least a week and executed the attack with almost no trouble ” Krempa told Mishpacha at the site of the attack.

The rest as they say is history: Hizbullah launched a coordinated two-pronged attack killing two soldiers and kidnapping Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev. “The whole thing took no more than three to four minutes ” said Mayor Krempa.

It is easy to see how Hizbullah chose the site for the attack. The area is mountainous and lush giving attackers ample opportunity to monitor IDF movements while at the same time avoiding detection. The area is also walking distance to a village Hayit al-Shaar located on a hilltop a kilometer or two inside Lebanese territory. The village likely played a critical role in the success of the operation both in terms of providing material support to Hizbullah (the attackers likely made use of the community grocery store for instance) and in terms of providing cover for the vehicles fleeing with Regev and Goldwasser.

In many ways Krempa is an appropriate representative of this region. He is a throwback to the Israelof a time gone by a classic sabra with heavily accented English and a gruff appearance but a warm tone in personal conversation. Above all his defining characteristics are a solid grip on reality an unshakeable belief in the justice and future ofIsrael and a dedication to the clear unfiltered truth.

Looking around the site of the attack the mayor notes some improvements that have been made since the war especially a secondary electronic fence that has been installed to separate the Israeli road from the border fence. Today the 2006 attack in which the terrorists dragged Regev and Goldwasser — who were both either injured or killed during the initial violence — through a yellow gate on the Lebanese side of the border into a waiting car would be much more difficult to execute.

And yet Krempa cannot hide the concern in his eyes when he thinks about the details of the attack which occurred just a few hundred meters from the homes in Moshav Zar’it. “There was nothing to prevent them from attacking Zar’it itself and taking civilian hostages or worse G-d forbid. It could have been a repeat of the 1974 Ma’alot attack ” he says referring to the terrorist assault by infiltrators from Lebanon who killed 22 Israeli schoolchildren.