Democrats increasingly suspect Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of trying to interfere in U.S. domestic politics by ignoring President Joe Biden’s calls to negotiate a peace deal in Gaza and confront Hezbollah and Iran weeks before the U.S. election, according to The Hill, a legislative website.

The rapidly escalating confrontation between Israel, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and Hezbollah’s ally, Iran, has undermined Biden’s efforts to achieve peace through diplomacy.

The growing threat of a wider conflict has opened the door for former President Trump to claim that the world is “spinning out of control” under Biden.

Biden’s poll numbers among Muslim Americans continue to deteriorate amid escalating violence in the region, posing a serious political liability for Vice President Harris in Michigan, a state Democrats must win.

Trump traveled to Michigan, a state with a large Arab and Muslim population, on Thursday to speak at a rally in Saginaw.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu's relationship with even the most pro-Israel Democrats has become increasingly confrontational.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) made headlines in March when he called Netanyahu a “major obstacle” to peace and urged Israel to hold new elections. Around that time, Biden called Israel’s assault on Gaza “overblown.”

“I am certainly concerned that Prime Minister Netanyahu is watching the U.S. election as he makes decisions about his military campaigns in the north and in Gaza,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told CNN in an interview with Erin Burnett on Tuesday.

“I hope this is not true, but it is certain that the Israeli government will not sign any diplomatic agreement before the US elections as a potential means of trying to influence the outcome,” Murphy said, referring to divisions among Democrats over the war.

A poll of 500 Arab-American voters conducted from September 9 to 20 showed Trump and Harris nearly tied, with the Republican slightly ahead, 42 percent to 41 percent.

This reflects a massive erosion in support for the Biden-Harris administration compared to 2020, when Biden received the support of 59 percent of Arab American voters.

A senior Senate Democratic aide backed Murphy's claim, noting that Netanyahu has long had a reputation as a "meddler" in American politics.

“I don’t believe for a moment that Netanyahu isn’t doing this just to influence local elections,” the aide said. “I think he thinks he can swing the Jewish vote, but he might swing the Arab-American vote.”

The Senate Democratic source pointed to Netanyahu's speech to a joint session of Congress in July, when he vowed "total victory" and denounced American anti-war protesters, many of them progressives, as "useful idiots" aiding Israel's enemies.

“He understands American politics. They are 100 percent involved in American politics,” the aide said, adding that this view is widely shared among Democrats on Capitol Hill.

“Look at everything that happened,” the aide said, referring to the entry of Israeli forces into southern Lebanon in recent days. “He interfered 100 percent in internal politics. He did that his entire career.”

Netanyahu has been playing in American politics since the 1990s, Alon Pinkas, a former adviser to former Israeli prime ministers Ehud Barak and Shimon Peres and a former Israeli consul general in New York, told the website.

“Netanyahu has a history of interfering in American elections,” he said. “He’s been doing it since the 1996 elections when he was elected [as Israeli prime minister] and played against [then-President] Clinton.”

"He intervened several times during the Clinton administration when he allied himself with [then-House Speaker Newt] Gingrich," he said.

Pinkas said Netanyahu supported fundraising events in Israel for then-Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election, even though he did not actually attend those events.

Netanyahu kept a low profile in the 2016 election amid widespread expectations that Hillary Clinton would defeat Trump, but “in 2020 it was all Trump,” he added. Netanyahu was vocal in his opposition to then-President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, calling it a “very bad deal” in a 2015 speech to a joint session of Congress.

Democrats have good reason to view Netanyahu’s latest military moves in the context of how they might affect the 2024 U.S. presidential election, said David Rothkopf, a former Clinton administration official and former CEO and editor of Foreign Policy magazine.

“I think it’s a reasonable concern based on the conversations I’ve had with the Israelis. They understand that [Netanyahu] is a Trump supporter and feels that it would be in his long-term interest to have Trump in office,” he told The Hill. “So that could somehow influence the decisions he makes over the next five weeks.”

Asked how Netanyahu might impact the election, Rothkopf pointed to the Biden administration’s inability to broker a peace deal despite months of concerted efforts, which has become a sore point with members of the Democratic Party’s progressive base.

“Their theory is that the turmoil in the Middle East may not reflect well on the administration. But having said that, if people come back, they will also find that there are problems that Trump contributed to. That will affect different voters differently, but that’s the basic theory,” he said.

Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have been pressing Netanyahu for nearly a year to negotiate a cease-fire, and U.S. officials say the Israeli prime minister largely agreed to a private deal before later backing out.

Instead of lowering the temperature in the region as Biden demanded, the Netanyahu regime escalated the situation by killing a senior Hezbollah leader in Beirut in July and assassinating Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, in Tehran.

Then last month, Israel escalated its offensive against Hezbollah by detonating explosive devices inside walkie-talkies controlled by Hezbollah members, killing 32 people and wounding nearly 3,000 others.

This was followed by an Israeli air strike on Beirut last week that killed Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, along with members of his inner circle.

Israel then escalated its offensive again, launching a ground assault on southern Lebanon on Tuesday and following that with an airstrike on a medical center in central Beirut on Thursday, prompting the Lebanese government to accuse Israel of targeting civilian infrastructure.

Biden responded cautiously to last week’s strike on Nasrallah’s assassination, describing his death as “an act of justice for his many victims,” including hundreds of Americans killed by Hezbollah over four decades.

But the president stressed that “our ultimate goal is to de-escalate the ongoing conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon through diplomatic means,” noting that his administration is seeking a ceasefire in Gaza that includes the release of the hostages, as well as a broader peace deal that “brings people safely back to their homes in Israel and southern Lebanon.” Asked Saturday whether an Israeli ground invasion of Lebanon was inevitable, Biden told reporters: “It’s time for a ceasefire.”