Rosh HaNikra is where Israel's coastline runs out. A headland of soft white chalk drops about 70 metres straight into the Mediterranean — the only stretch of the country's shore where the mountain meets the sea with no sand between them — and the Lebanese border runs across the top of it. The rock is weak, chalk banded with dark flint and split long ago by a fault; water crept into the cracks and widened them, and winter storms blasted out the rest, hollowing roughly 200 metres of linked sea caves that are still growing. The same soft rock made the headland useful. British army engineers cut railway tunnels through it in 1941 and 1942, running trains from Haifa on to Beirut and Tripoli. The line lasted five years: in March 1948 Haganah sappers blew its bridge to stop Lebanese forces crossing, and the tunnels have been sealed ever since.
Getting down is half of it. A cable car pitched at 60 degrees — its operator calls it the world's steepest — drops you the 70 metres to sea level in about two minutes, and from the bottom a walkway loops through the chambers. The chalk is wet and gleams, and the water shifts from navy in the shadows to a lit turquoise where the openings face the sea. Rock hyraxes doze on the stones near the lower entrance. You cannot make that trip now. The site closed in October 2023 when the Lebanese border became a war zone, reopened in May 2025 and got its cable car running again that December — then in May 2026 a Hezbollah drone hit the car park, wounding workers, and the army sealed the coast from here to Achziv as a closed military zone.