Mortar rounds have occasionally drawn Israel into the fighting, and on June 22 a cross-border missile attack killed a 14-year-old Israeli boy. But for the most part, the Golan remains sleepy and lush. When I visited just a few days before that strike, the air was clear and the UN tents at Quneitra flapped lazily in the breeze. The Quneitra checkpoint, which until the outbreak of the Syrian civil war was little more than a transit point for trucks of Druze-grown Golan apples bound for the Syrian market, was almost completely still.

“Sometimes we have battles in front of us and tourists will hear the noises and see the fighting, but that happens only once every few months,” says Marom. “I’ll have tourists sitting at a wonderful lunch one mile from the border, and I tell them that al-Qaeda is looking at them, and they go crazy with it. They say, ‘Are you sure?’ To them, it’s like something from the moon, and they want to see.”

Last week, as another Israeli border burst into flames and Israel launched an offensive against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, war spectatorship moved to a new front. In the Israeli border town of Sderot, a largely impoverished, immigrant-heavy enclave that has taken the brunt of Hamas rocket fire ever since Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, residents have set up plastic lawn chairs to applaud missile interceptions by the Iron Dome, Israel’s missile-defense system. Gazans too have cheered as missiles hurtle out of the strip and toward Israeli cities.

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War tourism is nothing new; from Waterloo to Gettysburg, armies gathering on battlefields have long been trailed by packs of eager spectators. What is new, says Philip Stone, director of the Institute for Dark Tourism Research at the U.K.’s University of Central Lancashire, is the commercialization of it.

“This phenomenon has historical precedents. You can make an argument that with some of his very first tour groups, Thomas Cook took people to see hangings in Cornwall,” Stone says, referring to the founder of the eponymous travel agency and the public executions that were common in England in the 1700s and 1800s. “But what’s changing is how these trips are being formalized through the tourism industry, as well as the fact that technology and the Internet are also picking up on it.”

The Dark Tourism Institute was founded in 2012 to chronicle voyeurism at all sorts of macabre locations. Stone and his team have just launched a five-year project to examine the effects that war tourism has on cultural-heritage sites across the globe.

Fueled by travel documentaries such as Vice videos and Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown, the broader adventure-tourism industry, which includes travel to war zones and political hotspots, has grown by an average of 65 percent annually over the past four years and is now estimated to be worth $263 billion. While some hyper-extreme tour operators, among them War Zone Tours and Wild Frontiers, have been around since the 1990s, the past decade has produced a bumper crop of plucky agencies catering to thrill-seeking wayfarers.