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By Luke Baker

KIRYAT SHMONA, Israel, Aug 4 (Reuters) - Two days ago, two dozen buses turned up in this town in the far north of Israel, just across the border from Lebanon, and carted away another 1,200 people.

The buses took the passengers -- mostly the elderly, women and children -- nearly 500 km (300 miles) south to the Red Sea resort of Eilat, the furthest point you can get from Kiryat Shmona without leaving Israel.

It was not the first convoy to leave, and residents of this tourist town, which has been hit by more than 400 Hizbollah rockets in the past three weeks, say it won't be the last.

The exodus has literally drained the life from Kiryat Shmona, normally a peaceful place of around 25,000 people nestled up against the hills of western Galilee. Residents say up to 80 percent of the population has now fled.

"It's terrible, just terrible," said Ludmilla Antonchenko, 30, the manager of a local supermarket who has stayed behind to keep the store open even though very few people come.

"If this goes on for another month, you can forget about the city, it will die. People won't come back," she said.

"Those who have children don't want to live like this, with this constant fear. They want to move elsewhere."

Driving through Kiryat Shmona, one would almost think it had been evacuated following a nuclear scare. There is hardly a soul on the streets, rubbish blows down the main roads and collects in empty corners, the traffic lights solemnly blink orange.

Rather than 20 percent of the population still being around, one could be forgiven for thinking everyone had fled because those who remain spend their days underground in bunkers.

Kiryat Shmona, less than three kilometres (two miles) from the Lebanese border, is perhaps one of the most abandoned of northern Israel's towns and cities, but there are many others like it.

A drive south to the Sea of Galilee, past the Mount of Beatitudes and Tiberias, normally a hectic Holy Land favourite at this time of year, reveals barely a car on the road.

About 1.5 million Israelis live in range of Hizbollah's rockets and tens of thousands have moved away. At least 26 civilians in the north have been killed and hundreds wounded by the 2,000 rockets Hizbollah has fired.

"DEAD TOWN"

By comparison, Lebanese authorities estimate that a quarter of the country's population, or around 900,000 people, have been forced to flee Israel's sustained bombardment of southern Lebanon and targets around Beirut in the past three weeks.

Around 700 Lebanese, the vast majority of them civilians, have been killed in those bombardments, and around 3,000 have been wounded, the authorities there say.

One person who has stayed behind in Kiryat Shmona is Shimon Abitbul, the head of the local Magen David Adom ambulance service. His team has handled anywhere up to 75 calls a day in and around Kiryat Shmona in the past three weeks, he says.

"It's been busy, it's constant," said the 47-year-old, who celebrated his birthday the day the conflict started, July 12.

"Thankfully no one here has been killed, but we've had more than 150 injured. The biggest impact though is the psychological one, people are really scared," he said.

At the mall just outside Kiryat Shmona, where Israeli and foreign tourists come in summer for the clean mountain air and to do sports like river rafting, all the shops are shuttered apart from the pharmacy and the supermarket.

The tables and chairs at the coffee shop in the middle of the mall are overturned, as if abandoned in a mad rush. The other shopping centre in town was hit by a Katyusha rocket.

"There's nothing, it's dead," said Wesam Marie, 25, the security guard at the mall, who doesn't really have anything to secure or guard. "I've never seen anything like it."