Messianic leader shares about serving the Lord and residents of Kiryat Shmona on Israel's northern front amid escalation with Hezbollah

On the Lebanese border in Israel's north and under intensified rocket fire, Pastor Israel Iluz joins ALL ISRAEL NEWS Editor-in-Chief Joel Rosenberg and his wife Lynn for an "Inside the Epicenter" podcast, where he shares what it is like to live and serve the Lord and bless the residents of Kiryat Shmona in such extraordinary times.

Israeli forces have been battling Hezbollah since last October, when the terror group began launching missiles toward Israel in solidarity with the Hamas terrorist organization in Gaza, shortly after the Oct. 7 invasion and attack on southern Israel.

Pastor Iluz, leads a Messianic Evangelical congregation, the only one of its kind in the city. Joel and Lynn visited Iluz in the north last February to learn how residents in the north were coping with living on an active war front.

Their visit came as part of The Joshua Fund ministry, the charity organization the Rosenbergs launched in 2006 to bless Israel and her neighbors in the name of Jesus. The Joshua Fund invests prayerfully and financially in congregations and individuals in the land who are making a difference and blessing communities through the wonderful ministries they lead.

During the February interview, Iluz said he expected that a massive war with Hezbollah in Lebanon would break out. "On a scale of 1 to 10 – with 10 meaning a big war is certain – I’d say it’s a 15," he said.

“Kiryat Shmona is the largest Israeli city in the north with 23,000 people, but almost entirely evacuated and under intense missile barrage over this last year,” Rosenberg said, before asking Iluz how his congregation was doing almost eight months since his last visit.

“Praise God. We’re still, as you all know, we’ve been cooking meals in Kiryat Shmona and we’re still doing this. All of us are good, everybody is in a good spirit. And, still, the volunteers come in from all over the world –we've got now about seven or eight volunteers that are helping us with the food program, so praise God," Iluz said. "As you probably know, there are many forces that came to the north, so we might have to even now increase our meals again from what's happening there in the north. So praise God, we're all good.”

He said that their congregation has provided more than 85,000 meals since the beginning of the war.

"On average, it’s between 2,000-2,500 every week that we do but Friday it's exceptional because we do almost 1,400 to 1,500 meals every Friday.”

Rosenberg explained how Pastor Iluz's son, Yonatan, is a chef who had just opened his first restaurant, but seeing the great need since the war, he began to give hundreds of meals away for free.

“He put all his savings and hard work into this. And then… the war came and everybody evacuated, and he was somewhat quite discouraged. But the Lord sort of prompted you. There's a lot of opportunity to cook for people who don't have hot meals and need the love of Yeshua, Jesus, to be an encouragement. And he stepped up,” Rosenberg said.

Iluz replied, “You know, actually, it was quite interesting because everybody was looking for food and many came to him… everybody had evacuated – all the shops were closed. And only his stayed open. So they realized, "Wow! They came to him and he was just giving food away."

Eventually, Iluz explained, they decided to expand further and moved the meal service to the church.

"And now it's thousands of meals, and volunteers came. We just evolved and developed as we went and praise God, the Lord has supplied so much of the need. And thank God obviously for The Joshua Project. That helped us a lot to feed this project and has done a lot for us.”