Only a week ago, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was busy trying to salvage his annexation program and even toyed with the idea of dismantling the unity government and calling for new elections. The polls showed him reaching new heights with over 40 mandates despite the trial he faces and despite the expensive and bloated government he cobbled together when hundreds of thousands of citizens are unemployed.

But on June 6, at the very last minute, the prime minister stepped on the brake. Netanyahu convened the coronavirus cabinet in an emergency Zoom meeting and approved a list of stringent measures in an effort to halt the second wave of the disease, a round that looks even more severe than the first.

Israel is now seeing more than a thousand infected people a day — more than any European country. Israeli hospitals began to fill up with patients in serious condition as the economic status of hundreds of thousands continued to deteriorate. Israel, which had served as a global model for treating COVID-19, could be heading for another lockdown.

How bad is it? At the bleak meeting that went on for hours, Netanyahu warned against a loss of control that could lead to another full lockdown, saying, “The pandemic is spreading — that's as clear as day. It is rising steeply daily and it is dragging with it, contrary to what we had been told, a trail of critically ill patients. … If we don’t act now, we’ll find ourselves with hundreds, perhaps even more than a thousand seriously ill people in the coming weeks. And this can paralyze all our systems."