Hello and welcome to our coverage of the Israeli elections. Polls have opened in the first election since the Hamas-led attacks of 7 October 2023, Israel’s subsequent destruction of Gaza, and the launch of its war with the US against Iran.
Most polling shows prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition will lose its majority in the 120-seat Knesset, but the opposition bloc will probably also fall short of the 61 seats needed to form a government.
For Netanyahu, 76, who has led the most far-right government in Israel’s history, the stakes are both political and personal. He is on trial for corruption in three separate cases, despite interventions from Donald Trump, who called for a pre-emptive pardon in the long-running saga and even wrote to Israeli president Isaac Herzog on Netanyahu’s behalf. The cases are ongoing.
It was on Netanyahu’s watch that Hamas militants broke out from Gaza three years ago to kill nearly 1,200 people, the majority of them civilians, on the deadliest day in Israel’s history. This election is widely seen as a referendum on Netanyahu’s leadership since those attacks.
The IDF’s globally condemned assault on Gaza, which has killed at least 75,000 people and been deemed a genocide by a UN commission, academics, legal scholars and Israeli and international rights groups, has left Israel a pariah on the world stage.
Three years of regional conflict followed the 7 October attacks, including this year’s war on Iran, which sparked an ongoing global energy crisis and has killed thousands of people, mainly in Lebanon and Iran.
What is more, under Netanyahu’s government there has been an unprecedented, aggressive surge of deadly extremist settler violence to bolster Israeli control in the occupied West Bank, as settler militants and their political backers – who have propped up Netanyahu’s government – exploited their seat at the cabinet table and expanded with impunity.
Indeed, settlement expansion has been a key feature of Netanyahu’s re-election campaign. However, it is also a driving force behind Israel’s growing international isolation, with many of its traditional allies condemning “settler terrorists” and announcing plans to impose sanctions.
Police believe the arrest of three people in southern Israel who are suspected of being involved in voting bribe attempts was a single incident and not part of a larger campaign, according to Dean Livne, acting director-general of the Elections Committee.
Citing figures released by the Central Elections Committee, the Israeli newspaper Ynet is reporting that voter turnout in the election reached 16.68% by 10am local time (8am GMT), the highest level recorded at that hour since 1981.
Over 1.2m Israelis had cast their ballots by 10am, according to the data, a rise of 0.78 percentage points compared with the same stage of the previous election in 2022.
In Sanhedria cemetery in north Jerusalem, ultra-orthodox voters came to the tombs of revered rabbis before they cast their ballots. There was no question of which way they were going to vote: for the parties representing Ashkenazi and Sephardic ultra-orthodox. But some at the Sanhedria cemetery, the young especially, made clear they only would do so reluctantly.
Yair Shuker, aged 19, said only one issue was important to him. “The election is about whether we will live by the Torah, or there will be no Torah. There will be a Jewish state or there will be no Jewish state,” he said.
And for him – as with almost all Israel’s ultra-orthodox (the Haredim) – the critical measure of the state’s level of observance is whether the Haredim would continue have exemption from military service.
“There are some who study the Torah, and some who stand and defend the land,” Shuker said.
The exemption for ultra-orthodox religious students dates back to the founding the state, but has long been a sort of tension among Israeli Jews, all the more so since the 7 October attack in 2023 and the start of the Gaza war. Israel’s supreme court ruled in 2024 that the blanket exemption for haredi men had no basis in law.
In return for their support in keeping him in power, Benjamin Netanyahu promised the ultra-orthodox parties (the Sephardic party Shas and the Ashkenazi United Torah Judaism) new legislation that would perpetuate the exemption, but has failed to deliver on that promise due to splits in his coalition. As a result both parties left the government, though Shas remained part of the coalition.
Whatever their feelings about Netanyahu, both would vote against a secular-led government led by the current opposition parties, which have pledged to end the exemption once and for all, and enforce military service if necessary.
Shuker said he did not trust either coalition, but would vote because he had been told to. “The rabbi has asked us to vote for Shas, so I will vote,” he said. A 23-year-old Ashkenazi ultra-orthodox, who identified himself as Yaacov K, expressed the same sense of disillusion mixed with duty. He said:
I’ll tell you the truth. To me and most of the people around me, we don’t believe in anyone.
If you’re asking me, I’ll never go and vote. But I have a rabbi and the rabbi told me listen, you have to go and vote. And if he says you have to go and vote, then that’s what I do. I don’t even start thinking if it’s worth it for me or not worth it for me.
The open distrust and contempt for Netanyahu, coupled with obedience and party discipline, could be one reason that the prime minister’s bloc has over-performed by a seat or two in past elections, compared to his poll numbers. That could be crucial if the pattern is repeated.
Azriel Zadok, a rabbi who had come for morning prayers at the Sanhedria cemetery, argued that the mass ultra-orthodox vote was essential to preserve Israel’s Jewish identity from “the left”.
“We have no problem with the secular. We pray for them, and we pray for the soldiers,” Zadok said. “Our problem is with the leftists we are trying to decide for us how we should live.” “They want us to go to the beach on Saturday and they want us to marry outside our faith. We want to remain Jews,” the rabbi added.
The centre left is only a small part of the opposition bloc, and it does not propose to change the ultra-orthodox lifestyle. But the bloc is united on the insistence that the Haredim should do their part in the defence of the nation. It is the most divisive issue among Israeli Jews voting today.
According to Israel’s Hareetz newspaper, United Arab List (Ra’am), an Islamist party headed by Mansour Abbas, has filed a complaint to the Central Elections Committee, alleging that a systematic campaign has been launched to disrupt voting for the party.
In a statement, the party said police arrested several of its leading activists in southern Israel’s Negev region before dawn with no clear justification, according to Hareetz.
The party also said there is a widespread shortage of its Arabic-language ballot slips in several areas, including the cities of Nazareth and Shfaram in northern Israel. We have not yet been able to independently verify these claims.
About 15 million people live in areas under Israeli control. Just over 7 million Jewish Israelis and 1.7 million Palestinian citizens of Israel live within the country’s pre-1967 borders, known as the “green line”, and have full voting rights.
In the occupied West Bank, more than 500,000 Israeli settlers can vote. They live among 3.1 million Palestinians who are subject to military rule and do not have the right to vote.
In occupied East Jerusalem more than 230,000 Israelis with voting rights live among 350,000 Palestinians who cannot vote.
Two million Palestinians in Gaza, who live under Israeli military occupation, according to the international court of justice, also have no vote.
The Knesset, the Israeli parliament, has 120 seats, with lawmakers voted in through a system of proportional representation. No single party has ever claimed a majority of 61 seats, so Israel has always been governed by coalitions.
When the results are in, the president invites the party with the largest number of seats to try to agree a governing coalition. Exit polls are released at 10pm Israeli time (8pm GMT), and the first indication of actual voting counts usually emerges in the early hours of the morning.
Getting full results could take much longer, with the outcome potentially hanging on the electoral fortunes of two small parties, which need to win 3.25% of the overall vote to take up seats in the Knesset. Polling puts both around this threshold. If they cross it, they each get four seats, which would have a significant impact on coalition building options.
The far-right Amcha Yisrael is led by the former general Ofer Winter, who has pledged to back Netanyahu for prime minister if he gets into the Knesset. The Reservists is a rightwing Zionist party focused on ensuring universal conscription whose leaders sit between the two blocs.
They have ruled out joining any government supported by either the ultra-Orthodox – key Netanyahu allies – or Palestinian parties whose backing Gadi Eisenkot is likely to need. If it goes down to the wire, counting could take more than a day.
Palestinians with Israeli citizenship constitute about a fifth of the population but are consistently under-represented in the parliament.
Benjamin Netanyahu and most of his chief rivals have said they won’t form a coalition with parties (broadly) representing Palestinian citizens of Israel – even if that means political gridlock.
But after the votes are counted these parties could hold a critical balance of power, as my colleagues Emma Graham-Harrisonand Quique Kierszenbaum highlight in this story. Here is an extract from their report:
Palestinian citizens of Israel are forecast to secure between 12 and 15 seats, divided between the Islamist Ra’am and the Joint List alliance of three smaller parties, Hadash, Balad and Ta’al.
The mathematics of power are clear, even though most of the Jewish Israeli opposition has ruled out a coalition with Arab politicians, and Netanyahu and his allies have been doing everything they can to make such an alliance politically toxic.
There is recent precedent for breaking promises not to work with Palestinians, however. The Ra’am leader, Mansour Abbas, in 2021 took his party into a historic coalition government with Naftali Bennett, now part of the opposition bloc, and Netanyahu himself had previously started coalition negotiations with Abbas.
One prospective voter, Mohammed, works at a hi-tech company, managing both Jewish and Arab employees, which he sees as a template for a different future for Israel.
Although disappointed that most Jewish Israeli opposition parties have ruled out a coalition with Palestinian parties, he understands the political logic, and he expects their position to shift once results are in.
“At the end of the day, everything is mathematics, right? One plus one is two. They cannot do anything without [those seats]. So they must do [some kind of deal] and they will do it.”
A consistent majority of Israeli polls show prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s current coalition bloc with the ultra-Orthodox and the far right will fall below the threshold of 61 seats needed to form a government.
But even though there is a clear anti-Netanyahu majority, polls indicate that the Jewish Israeli opposition bloc will also fall short of the required seats, meaning weeks or even months of political wrangling may be in store as parties make deals and trade concessions.
So who are Netanyahu’s leading rivals in the race?
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As we have mentioned in a previous post, the man leading the field to potentially replace Netanyahu, Gadi Eisenkot, is a former head of the Israeli military who formulated the notorious Dahiya doctrine of using “disproportionate force” to cause damage and destruction.
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Naftali Bennett is a former prime minister and former chair of the settler council, who supports annexing much of the West Bank.
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Avigdor Lieberman wants to dismantle the Palestinian Authority and replace it with an Israeli-Jordanian confederation (though apparently he did not consult the Jordanians about this plan).
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The Democrats, the only remaining political home for Israel’s Zionist left, are led by Yair Golan, a former general and deputy head of Israel’s military.
Across Israel, voting is now under way. Here are some of the latest images being sent to us over the newswires:
Tens of thousands of Israelis living abroad have flown in for the elections, according to Aid Coalition, a US-based nonprofit focused on strengthening Israel’s democracy. Israeli law generally requires citizens to vote in person in the country, with narrow exceptions for diplomats and certain official emissaries abroad.
It’s unclear what effect these voters might have, but many liberal Israelis who don’t support prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu have left the country in recent years, suggesting that those returning to cast ballots may not support him.
Aid Coalition estimates that as many as 67,000 voters are returning to Israel. It says about half are flying in from the US, with others from Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
The Associated Press spoke to some Israelis planning to travel, who said they felt a sense of obligation to try to preserve Israel’s democracy.
Yael Natra said she had never considered returning to vote in her home country’s elections as she felt it wasn’t right to cast a ballot in a place she no longer lived. However this year she plans to cast her ballot for parties not aligned with the current government led by Netanyahu.
The Israel that I grew up in is disappearing … If something won’t change this time, I don’t know what’s going to be.
Hadar Susskind said he wants a new Israeli government to reverse course in the West Bank and Gaza. He and four relatives who live in the US were flying back to “reaffirm Israel’s democracy,” he said.
This government is digging the hole deeper every day … The first thing the new government needs to do is put the shovel down.
Israel’s president Isaac Herzog has voted in Jerusalem.
Herzog will play a crucial role in the days to come. After the final results are in, he will consult party leaders on who they want as prime minister and then invite the candidate he believes has the best chance of forming a government to try to form a coalition.
That nominee has up to 42 days to form a government.
Families bereaved in the 7 October attacks began election day with a protest at 6.29 am, the same time Hamas launched its attack just over three years ago.
They gathered in the Tel Aviv plaza that has become known as “hostages square”, because it was the centre of demonstrations demanding the return of over 200 captives from Gaza.
Holding pictures of their loved ones, they observed a minute of silence, then called on voters to remember the losses and betrayals of that day as they choose the next government.
“Three years after the massacre, our loved ones will not be voting today. Go out and vote – remember them at the ballot box. This is what these elections are about!” the group said in a statement.
They are not explicitly backing any political party, but one of their key demands is a State Commission of Inquiry into the attacks.
Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has strongly resisted the prospect of an impartial probe, and it has become a rallying point for the opposition parties trying to unseat him.
Two days before the vote, relatives of the dead released a video making the same demand.
Four decades ago, when the extremist rabbi Meir Kahane won a single seat in Israel’s Knesset, other legislators passed a law to prevent him running again, left the chamber when he rose to speak and worked together to block discussion of his ethnonationalist proposals.
These ranged from mass expulsions of Palestinians to apartheid provisions such as segregated beaches and the criminalisation of sex between Jews and gentiles.
This month, Kahane’s political heirs may claim more Knesset seats in national elections than the remains of the once mighty Labor party, home of Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and Golda Meir.
At an election rally this week, Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, mixed calls for ethnic cleansing and jokes about starving Palestinian prisoners with a proud anecdote about his conviction in 1998 over bumper stickers that read “Rabbi Kahane was right”.
A poll for the Israel Hayom newspaper, published on 16 October, forecast his Jewish Strength party would win nine seats in the 27 October election. The Democrats, successor to the Labor party led by former general Yair Golan, were predicted to claim eight seats.
Ben-Gvir’s rise is one of the more extreme manifestations of a broad shift to the right among Jewish citizens of Israel. It is particularly pronounced among the young and will shape the country’s next government, regardless of who becomes prime minister after closely fought elections.
More than 500,000 Israelis have reached voting age since the last election in 2022, and three-quarters of first-time Jewish voters define themselves as right or centre-right, a recent poll for Channel 12 television found (it did not survey Palestinian citizens of Israel).
The generation voting for the first time came of age after the Oslo process collapsed, when the prospect of negotiating a political resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict seemed to be fading.
They were teenagers during the Hamas attacks on 7 October 2023, which resulted in the deaths of about 1,200 people, the majority of them civilians. Militants took 251 living hostages and dead bodies to Gaza, leading to a two-year hostage crisis.
Erez Uzan, vice-chair of the Young Democrats, said:
There’s a lot of people, especially young people, who think that there is no solving the conflict, that we’ll always be at war. There’s a lot of racism, a lot of hatred, but most of all, there’s fear.
Bucking global trends, young Israelis are more rightwing than older generations and are likely to vote in a new Knesset with more rightwing members than the current chamber, said Dahlia Scheindlin, a political analyst and public opinion researcher.
Consistently rightwing ultra-Orthodox and nationalist religious communities make up a growing proportion of Israel’s Jewish population but still account for only around a quarter of the electorate, so demographics alone do not explain the growing age gap on political issues.
“All Israelis, and particularly younger people, have been living in a political environment where not only is the government rightwing but the general terms of debate are really populist and ultra-nationalist. That’s all they know. They’re socialised into it,” Scheindlin said.
There’s been a real downplaying of anything to do with democracy, universal values or human rights. Those are seen as weak, if they’re discussed at all, possibly as bad as betrayal. And very few politicians talk about peace, concessions, negotiations, Palestinian self-determination, or even Palestinian wellbeing.
The far right is on the rise globally, but Israeli politics that “revolve round constant conflict” heighten the appeal of ethnonationalist messages, Uzan said.
“We grow up in fear, seeing war all around us – and that leads to a certain perspective. In the last 20 years, our leadership in the centre-left camp has avoided talking about security issues,” Uzan said, adding they had ceded that ground to the right.
The rise of the far right and religious fundamentalism, combined with Netanyahu’s assault on institutions protecting Israel’s partial democracy (Palestinians living under Israeli military rule in the occupied West Bank do not have the rights of citizens), mean many Israelis on the centre and left see this vote as existential.
David Harel, the president of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, says the country’s current path leads towards a bleak future as a corrupt, impoverished pariah state, dominated by messianic fundamentalists maintaining a “violent, cruel occupation”.
“We are already in ‘stoppage time’. If we lose this time, there will be no second chance. The country we love so dearly will breathe its last. Plain and simple!” he told a rally in the northern city of Haifa.
There are more than 12,000 polling stations opening across the country. In Jerusalem, some voters were lined up before polls even opened at 7am, ready to cast their ballots.
He has been called the man who is everything that Benjamin Netanyahu is not. Gadi Eisenkot, a former general and the main opposition candidate in Israel’s elections, is unpolished where Netanyahu is slick.
To Israelis he is both menschy (decent) and schlumpy (unkempt), his crumpled appearance contrasting with Netanyahu’s hair rinse, makeup and obsessive need to control his media depiction. In the Israeli commentator Anshel Pfeffer’s framing, he is the anti-Bibi among a roster of wanna-Bibis.
And in an era of Israeli politics that has been defined by betrayals, dirty tricks and public and private smears, Eisenkot’s brand is rectitude. He only entered politics four years ago, and the name of his party – Yashar – means “straight” or “honest”.
But on key issues, an Israel under Eisenkot may not look very different, as he has been non-committal on crucial issues – including the two-state solution and Israeli settlement of the occupied West Bank.
For many voters, Eisenkot’s appeal is less about ideology than the vibe around him. Key to his appeal, said Dahlia Scheindlin, an Israeli pollster and political analyst, is his “very modest background”. While Netanyahu is the son of a Polish-born academic, Eisenkot’s family were Mizrahi Jews from Morocco. He joined the army as an infantryman, and worked his way through the ranks to become the Israeli military’s chief of staff.
But what precisely does Eisenkot believe in? On the domestic front, he is pushing for a full investigation of the intelligence failures that allowed Hamas’s deadly 7 October 2023 attack. More divisive is his support for the end of the military draft exemption for the ultra-Orthodox, long a source of friction in Israeli society.
On the biggest issues, not least a two-state solution that would create a Palestinian state – he is ambiguous.
“I’ve never said that the solution is two states for two peoples,” Eisenkot said on the campaign trail. “There is a very deep religious-national conflict here, and anyone who thinks an agreement can be reached now is gravely mistaken.”
On the broader issue of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, Eisenkot is also evasive. He opposes the planned E1 settlement block that is seen as a potential obstacle to any future Palestinian state, but he supports settlement in general.
Where Eisenkot separates himself from the current government, is over Netanyahu’s decision to place the far-right, pro-settler minister Bezalel Smotrich in charge of the occupied West Bank, where there has been a surge of settler violence, prompting widespread international condemnation and sanctions. Eisenkot has said he would immediately “reverse” that situation and put the army back in charge of the West Bank.
“What Eisenkot and the rest are basically saying,” said Prof Yossi Mekelberg of the Chatham House thinktank, “is we’ll be better CEOs. We’ll manage the country better, not take it in a different direction … They are not really talking about the Palestinian issue.”
Eisenkot is unequivocally not a dove in his views on the use of military force. As Israel’s northern front commander during the 2006 second Lebanon war, he was the architect of the notorious Dahiya doctrine, promising that Israel would wield “disproportionate power … and cause immense damage and destruction” – a policy that would see its fullest expression in the current Gaza war.
On Gaza, he has been more of a military realist, insisting two years ago that Israel was unlikely to win “total victory” over Hamas, and calling for a strategy that prioritised the lives of hostages still held by Hamas. His son Gal Meir Eisenkot, 25, died of his wounds in late 2023 after an operation in Gaza to recover the bodies of Israeli hostages.
But while observers say an Eisenkot administration would be likely to crack down on settler violence in the West Bank, they wonder if it would go much further.
Read Peter’s full profile of Eisenkot here:
Gadi Eisenkot, Netanyahu’s main challenger in Tuesday’s elections, has already been out greeting voters at a polling station in Ofakim, in Israel’s south.
The former army chief of staff spent four decades rising through the ranks of Israel’s military. He now leads the largest opposition party – Yashar.
Ofakim was one of the communities that was attacked by Hamas on 7 October 2023. Eisenkot’s visit was likely aimed at reminding voters of the security failures ahead of that attack, and of Benjamin Netanyahu’s refusal to launch a state commission of inquiry into them.
In Jerusalem
Israel is holding its first election since the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks, the deadliest day in the country’s history, which resulted in the deaths of about 1,200 people, the majority of them civilians.
Since then Israel has pursued a war of annihilation in Gaza, launched two inconclusive wars with Iran, and intensified a campaign of state-backed ethnic cleansing in theoccupied West Bank.
Domestically the coalition formed by Benjamin Netanyahu has taken aim at democratic institutions, including the supreme court. Many Israelis have described this election as the most consequential in their country’s history.
Here, Emma runs through everything you need to know – from the key players and issues, to when we can expect the results:
Hello and welcome to our coverage of the Israeli elections. Polls have opened in the first election since the Hamas-led attacks of 7 October 2023, Israel’s subsequent destruction of Gaza, and the launch of its war with the US against Iran.
Most polling shows prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition will lose its majority in the 120-seat Knesset, but the opposition bloc will probably also fall short of the 61 seats needed to form a government.
For Netanyahu, 76, who has led the most far-right government in Israel’s history, the stakes are both political and personal. He is on trial for corruption in three separate cases, despite interventions from Donald Trump, who called for a pre-emptive pardon in the long-running saga and even wrote to Israeli president Isaac Herzog on Netanyahu’s behalf. The cases are ongoing.
It was on Netanyahu’s watch that Hamas militants broke out from Gaza three years ago to kill nearly 1,200 people, the majority of them civilians, on the deadliest day in Israel’s history. This election is widely seen as a referendum on Netanyahu’s leadership since those attacks.
The IDF’s globally condemned assault on Gaza, which has killed at least 75,000 people and been deemed a genocide by a UN commission, academics, legal scholars and Israeli and international rights groups, has left Israel a pariah on the world stage.
Three years of regional conflict followed the 7 October attacks, including this year’s war on Iran, which sparked an ongoing global energy crisis and has killed thousands of people, mainly in Lebanon and Iran.
What is more, under Netanyahu’s government there has been an unprecedented, aggressive surge of deadly extremist settler violence to bolster Israeli control in the occupied West Bank, as settler militants and their political backers – who have propped up Netanyahu’s government – exploited their seat at the cabinet table and expanded with impunity.
Indeed, settlement expansion has been a key feature of Netanyahu’s re-election campaign. However, it is also a driving force behind Israel’s growing international isolation, with many of its traditional allies condemning “settler terrorists” and announcing plans to impose sanctions.
