Dov Lior

Dov Lior (Hebrew: דוב ליאור; born 30 October 1933) is an Israeli Orthodox rabbi and political figure part of a far-right, nationalist movement for an ethnic and religious state. He served as the Chief Rabbi of Kiryat Arba, a Jewish settlement near the West Bank town of Hebron, until late 2014. He is the dean (or rosh yeshiva) of the Kiryat Arba IDF-Hesder Yeshiva and leads the council of rabbis for the West Bank settlements. Lior founded the hard-right Tekumah party together with Arutz 7's owner Rabbi Zalman Melamed and Rabbi Chaim Steiner. Lior is a longtime symbol of religious and nationalist extremism in Israel. Lior has also expressed support for mass murderers, such as Israeli-American mass murderer Baruch Goldstein, who killed 29 Muslims in a Hebron mosque. He claimed the 2015 Islamic State attacks on Paris, which left 130 civilians dead, were deserved as payback for the Holocaust. When Israel invaded the Gaza Strip in 2014, he issued a religious ruling that allowed soldiers to kill civilians if that's what's needed for the safety of Israel and, if necessary, destroy Gaza entirely.