Late last month a strike on a soccer field in the Golan Heights killed several Arab Druze children and teenagers. The authorship of the attack remains unconfirmed but Tel Aviv accused the Lebanese group Hezbollah of being behind the incident. Israel has launched several highly provocative retaliatory strikes in the days since on civilian targets in Yemen, Lebanon and, most significantly, in Iran, where the country is presumed to be responsible for an explosion that killed Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran.

“I think it’s totally in Netanyahu’s hands now and he’s a captive of [Itamar] Ben-Gvir and [Bezalel] Smotrich, two of his more radical, rabid ministers without whom his government would collapse,” warned Maloof. “And so he has to go along with their dictates, and their dictates are to take back the entire region under some… notion of biblical, historical thinking that is so extreme. Just as we would criticize ISIS for its extreme interpretation of the Quran, these guys have an extreme interpretation of the Old Testament.”