“Agents of Iran tried to assassinate me.”

That sounds like something Donald Trump might’ve said, and maybe he did at some point, but the quote’s from Benjamin Netanyahu.

Don’t worry: He’s fine. He wasn’t at his Caesarea home on Saturday when a drone fired from Lebanon hit a nearby building. It wasn’t immediately clear how a projectile — any projectile — was allowed to get that close to somewhere Netanyahu could theoretically be. According to reports, the drone didn’t activate air raid sirens in the coastal town. The IDF shot down a couple of other drones near Tel Aviv, where the warning system did activate.

The ironic thing about UAVs is that they can be more effective than missiles and rockets when used against a country with advanced air defense capabilities. Sometimes, being rudimentary’s an asset. Still, the odds of Netanyahu being killed by a kamikaze drone are vanishingly small. Hezbollah would probably have better luck praying he dies of a heart attack, but even there, people like Netanyahu (and you can take that however you want) tend to be annoyingly hard to kill.

Following the incident, Netanyahu released a video. Dressed in a reaper-black polo and donning dark sunglasses, he boasted of killing Yahya Sinwar before reiterating a (by now convincing) promise to send anybody and everybody threatening the state of Israel to the grave. The camerman asks, “So, will something deter you?” to which a smirking Netanyahu says “No,” before walking out of the frame.

I despise the man. But I begrudgingly respect him, as much as you can respect a murderer. The meaning of “Never again” isn’t well understood outside of Israel. It’s not so much an exhortation to the world to prevent genocide as much as it is a promise that Jews will “never again” be sheep to the slaughter, even if they have to commit genocide themselves to avoid it. That latter bit’s unspoken, but 45,000 (give or take) dead in Gaza attests to it. This war is about more than Hamas. This is about proving a point.

I find the conduct of the war unspeakably abhorrent. Of course, Hamas’s actions on October 7, 2023, were likewise heinous. “Barbaric” is a fitting adjective for what we know about that day. If you’re going to argue that the full scope of Israel’s response remains justifiable, I implore you: Don’t be a coward about it. Either collective punishment on a very large scale is something you believe’s defensible given the nature of the October 7 attack, or you don’t.

Netanyahu’s not apologizing. For anything. And there’s something to be said for the brazenness of his decision to dismantle Hezbollah. For as long as I can remember, Hezbollah served as, to quote Dexter Filkins, “an Iranian aircraft carrier sitting off Israel’s coast.” As the group’s arsenal and capabilities grew, it took on an almost mythological reputation as a non-state military actor capable of challenging one of the most advanced fighting forces on Earth, in the IDF.

Hezbollah’s war with Israel in 2006 was a draw, and draws always count as wins for the weaker party. Hezbollah’s credentials were bolstered further by its success in Syria, where the group augmented Bashar al-Assad’s depleted army in the Russia-backed fight to destroy a motley collection of Sunni groups attempting to overthrow the regime. Hezbollah, the world reckoned, was not to be trifled with.

But it was a bluff. In retrospect, the threat to Israel from Hezbollah was wildly overstated. In just five weeks, the IDF and Mossad brought the group to its knees. The scope of Hezbollah’s humiliation — from the slapstick spectacle of exploding walkie talkies to the unrelenting nature of the IDF’s assassination campaign, carried out with total impunity in the capital city of a sovereign nation — testifies to a military-intelligence asymmetry that was far, far wider than many imagined, even considering Hezbollah’s inherent disadvantages as a non-state actor with no air force.

I’m reminded of the warning I issued on September 23 in the aptly-entitled “Israel’s Pissed.” Here’s what I said:

Whatever you want to say about the extent to which the first war with Hezbollah and, last year, Hamas’s lightning incursion, validated Hassan Nasrallah’s famous characterization of Israel’s vaunted security edifice as “weaker than a spider’s web,” the reality is that Israel commands one of the most formidable military-intelligence apparatuses on the planet. If push comes to absolute shove, they’ll wipe out threats, even if it means killing everybody and everything in the vicinity — women, children, donkeys, chickens, flowers, grass, all of it. And there’s no cavalry coming.

Four days later, Nasrallah was dead. Seven days after that, Hashem Safieddine was dead too. Whatever Naim Qassem might say, there’s no plan. Hezbollah’s been reduced to throwing Hail Marys — launching drones at Netanyahu’s beach house. They’ve effectively been downgraded. They’re basically Hamas now, only Shiite and with better uniforms.

Speaking of Hamas, in the 72 hours since Yahya Sinwar stumbled across a group of IDF commander trainees near Rafah, where he died after a gun battle, I’ve perused all manner of breathless commentary and editorials about “what’s next” for the group, all of which center around the (self-evident) conclusion that Khalil al-Hayya will run the show from Qatar while Izz al-Din al-Haddad and Yahya’s brother Mohammad will run things in Gaza.

A few things on that. First, nobody’s even sure Mohammad Sinwar’s alive, and if he is, he won’t be for long. Israel’s tried to kill him on too many occasions to count. At one point a decade ago — and this is a testament to the gallows humor this entire God-awful, never-ending bloodbath lends itself to at fairly regular intervals — the group tried to shake Mohammad’s Israeli intelligence tails by publishing a picture of him with his eyes closed laying on a bloody pillow. (I know, I know.) By some accounts, the possum act actually worked for time, but Mossad apparently caught on. Late last year, the IDF detailed a raid which the military said included Mohammad Sinwar’s “offices.”

For his part, Haddad’s capable militarily, but he sticks out like a sore thumb. When he’s in uniform, he looks like a character from a 1990s arcade fighting game. He sports a distinct gray buzz cut with a black stripe in the front, and his beard admits of the same inverted-skunk motif. Mohammad Sinwar could easily pass for any other Mohammad and when he’s clean-shaven, he could pass for any other anybody. But trust me when I say that Izz al-Din al-Haddad won’t pass for anyone other than Izz al-Din al-Haddad, particularly not at any border crossings.

Not that he’s headed towards any. Border crossings, I mean. Haddad used to (and technically still does) run Gaza City for the al-Qassam Brigades. So, he’s presumably up north somewhere. Ahmed Abu Ghandour‘s been dead for nearly a year, which I suppose makes Haddad “king in the north.” He’s never going to make it out of there alive. Northern Gaza is among the most dangerous places on Earth and it’s completely blockaded by the IDF. A mother carrying a baby on her shoulder would have a hard time getting to southern Gaza from northern Gaza without being identified as a “terrorist” and shot by the IDF. The only place Haddad wouldn’t be conspicuous is wandering around with a corndog and t-shirt tucked into some denim shorts at a county fair gun show in upper-east Tennessee.

In case it isn’t clear enough: Those two men are dead. Maybe literally. They could be dead right now, or half an hour from now or by the time you read this, and in any case, there’s no chance — none — that either of them will live through this war. As far as their capacity to “lead,” it isn’t even clear what that means. There’s no military structure left, and even if Haddad’s above ground, Mohammad Sinwar, if he’s alive, almost surely isn’t. Haddad probably doesn’t know where all the hostages are, which is problematic if releasing them is the key to a ceasefire. I doubt seriously that anybody in Qatar has an efficient means by which to communicate with the two of them in anything like real time. It’s not as if they can just jump on a group FaceTime call.

On the political side, there’s no point even mentioning Khaled Meshaal — himself the target of a famous Israeli assassination attempt — as a replacement for Yahya Sinwar. Lest anyone should forget, he was forced from Damascus at the onset of Syria’s civil war for his support of Sunni opposition elements. Remember: The Hamas-Iran (and Hamas-Hezbollah) nexus is an inter-sectarian alliance of convenience based around a common enemy (Israel). Hamas is Sunni. Hezbollah’s Shiite. Hezbollah fought, and ultimately triumphed over, the same Sunni opposition elements in Syria that Meshaal supported initially. Hamas needs Iran right now more than ever. Meshaal’s a non-starter as political leader.

So, Hayya — who’s friendliest with Iran —  it is. There’s no official word on that, but he made no secret last week that he’s effectively running things, at least on an acting basis. In April, he suggested to the AP that Hamas was open to a five-year truce during which it would lay down its weapons and become a purely political organization conditioned on the establishment of a Palestinian state along pre-1967 borders. Who knows what he thinks now — if his combative speech following Sinwar’s death was any indication, not that anymore. I suppose this goes without saying, but he’s only slightly less dead than Mohammad Sinwar and Haddad. Eventually, Hayya will have to go to Iran, and when he does… well, ask Ismail Haniyeh. (And you can forget about Osama Hamdan. Saleh al-Arouri will tell you what happens to Hamas reps who hang around in Beirut.)

Bottom line: All of these people are going to be killed by Israel eventually. It’s just that simple, and I’m no longer convinced that being in a Doha hotel room is going to save them. I’m not sure what — if anything — Iran can do to mitigate this situation. Certainly, firing ballistic missiles at Israel isn’t going to help. On Friday, Joe Biden said he’s been informed of Israel’s plans to retaliate for the IRGC’s October 1 fireworks show. He declined to provide any specifics. On Saturday, following the drone incident in Caesarea, Netanyahu said, “We will continue to eliminate terrorists and those who dispatch them.”