METULA, Israel — From her dining room window, Zvia Drori looks into Lebanon, less than a mile away from this border town, and sees the yellow flags of Hezbollah stirring slightly in the hot sun. For Ms. Drori and her neighbors, the banners seem to taunt Israel for its failure to wipe out the Shiite militia.

“I don’t want to stay here anymore,” Ms. Drori, 60, who came home to this border town Tuesday after fleeing for a month to Tel Aviv, said. “You see my beautiful view. But you still see Hezbollah.”

Thousands of Israelis are returning now to their homes near the Lebanese border. They are bitter and angry about what most call a futile war and what others call an outright loss.

“Israel lost big-time,” Ravit Ben-Simon, 25, glumly reopening her cellphone store yesterday in nearby Kiryat Shmona, said. “It wasn’t a worthwhile war at all. It all started because of the kidnapped soldiers. Where are they now? Still kidnapped. It was all for nothing.”

That view was reflected in a national poll released yesterday, showing that public support for the government of Prime Minister Olmert has plummeted since the start of the war.The poll by the Ma’ariv newspaper showed support for Mr. Olmert dropped to 40% from 78% on July 19, when the war began.

Here in what Israelis call the “frontline towns” — the kibbutz farming communities of the settlers who arrived decades ago and the hardscrabble towns that became home to immigrants — the view is harsh. The rain of Hezbollah rockets emptied these places, sending most residents fleeing to the south and forcing the remainder into grim bomb shelters in their basements.

They emerged with Monday’s ceasefire to sweep up the broken glass from windows, haul away the burned cars, and — in Kiryat Shmona yesterday — bury the dead. Hundreds of residents watched in the cemetery as uniformed soldiers fired a formal salute for First Sergeant David Amar, 24, a local who had been called up for the reserves. He was killed in Lebanon by an antitank missile Sunday, the day before the fighting stopped.

“He was always smiling. So happy,” a red-eyed soldier, who would not give her name, said. “Was the war worth this? No. We don’t think so.”

Israel Television yesterday aired interviews with returning reservists offering scathing criticisms of the army, complaining that supplies and armaments were missing, orders were confused, and food and water were in short supply.

During the war, 117 Israelis soldiers and 39 civilians were killed. More than 5,000 were injured, and at least 12,000 homes were damaged. Still, it was a lopsided war: Estimates of the civilian death toll in Lebanon range from 500 to more than 1,000, and Israeli bombardment left a path of destruction in southern Lebanon that is unmatched here.

But for Israel, accustomed to military domination of its Arab foes, the failure of its army to crush Hezbollah, or even to reduce the shelling, was a bitter pill.

“Our government was unprepared. They didn’t know what they were getting into,” Gital Lahyani, 36, said as she reopened her café in Kiryat Shmona. “The situation is even worse now. Now the Lebanese, and the Syrians and the Iranians, perceive us as weak. It just set the ground for the next war.”

Ms. Lahyani had left Kiryat Shmona with her three children during the fighting, and said her “Mon Cheri” cafe has lost its crucial summer business, when thousands of tourists usually come to the cooler hills of northern Israel. “Usually, at this time, you have to wait a week for a table” at her restaurant, she said. The government will reimburse her about $2,500 for her losses; she figures she lost closer to $25,000. “For businesses like us, the war is just beginning. I don’t think we can survive.”

Across town, in a bleak stand of block-style apartments normally filled with immigrants sent here by the government, David Biton, 44, drew hard on a cigarette as he waited for the government assessors to look at the damage to his place. The tobacco smoke fought the foul odor of rotting trash. Outside his apartment, a chunk of asphalt was missing and the burned hulk of a car offered testimony of a Katyusha rocket’s fall.

All but an estimated 3,000 of Kiryat Shmona’s 24,000 residents had left. Mr. Biton had stayed. It was “like a Warsaw ghetto. It was a catastrophe,” he said. Beneath his building, a few residents had huddled in the claustrophobic cement shelter until the tension drove them out. A child’s painted handprints were the only sign of cheer left in the place. Affixed to the steel door of the shelter was a sticker, handed out early in the conflict by a newspaper company: “We will win,” it boasted in patriotic blue.

“This war didn’t do anything,” Mr. Biton said, waving the cigarette in disgust. “We lost over 100 soldiers,” he said. “What did we do? We failed.”

More civilians were killed in Lebanon, he acknowledged, but he noted that Israel sent the Lebanese leaflets, telling them to leave before the attacks.

“I didn’t get any leaflet from Hassan Nasrallah,” he said, referring to Hezbollah’s leader.