An Israeli rabbi issued a ruling on Friday saying it was kosher to break the Sabbath to shoot Arab arsonists setting wildfires in the Holy Land.

Shmuel Eliyahu, chief rabbi of the northern city of Safed, was asked if the Jewish day of religious observance and abstinence from work beginning Friday evening may be desecrated to stop the suspected firebugs.

“By a miracle people have not been burned alive, but we are not supposed to rely on miracles,” Eliyahu wrote on Facebook, Israel news site Ynet reported.

“It’s certainly permitted and commanded to violate Shabbat to stop the fire and the arsonists. And if necessary, also to shoot them,” he wrote.

The rabbi added that if authorities would have shot those who set blazes in the northern cities of Haifa and Carmiel, as well as the religious community of Beit Meir near Jerusalem, “we would have been spared from this disaster.”

“I hope that the chief of staff and the police commissioner will give clear instructions to soldiers and police officers and civilians which reflect the fact that these acts of arson continue — because it is their responsibility,” he wrote.

Eliyahu is no stranger to inflammatory rhetoric.

In 2007, he advocated the carpet bombing of the general area from which rockets were launched into Israel, regardless of how many Palestinian lives would have been lost.

The following year, he called on Israel to carry out “state-sanctioned revenge” against Arabs in response to a terror attack on a yeshiva that killed eight students.

“It’s time to call the child by its name: Revenge, revenge, revenge. We mustn’t forget,” he wrote in a newsletter, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported. “[The state] has to pain them to the point where they scream ‘Enough,’ to the point where they fall flat on their face and scream ‘help.’”