Israel’s leaders are not hiding what comes next. “Very soon, Dahiyeh will resemble Khan Younis,” warned Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, earlier in March, referring respectively to a Hezbollah stronghold in Beirut and a city in southern Gaza that the Israeli army has almost completely razed to the ground. Zvi Sukkot, a member of the government from Smotrich’s party, urged: “We must conquer territory in southern Lebanon, destroy the villages there and annex the territory to the state of Israel.”