Photo: Nizzan Cohen / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0
Israelis began voting on Tuesday, October 27, in a parliamentary election widely seen as a verdict on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership since the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023, and the wars that followed. It is the country’s first general election since that attack.
Polling stations opened at 7 am local time (9.30 am IST) and are due to close at 10 pm (12.30 am IST on Wednesday), when exit polls are expected to give the first indication of the result. More than 7.3 million people are eligible to vote at about 6,200 polling stations, according to election authorities.
A tight race with no clear majority
Israelis vote for party lists, not individual candidates, to fill the 120 seats of the Knesset. A party needs at least 3.25% of the national vote to win any seats, and a government needs the backing of 61 members. No single party has ever won a majority on its own, so coalitions are the norm.
Opinion polls suggest neither Mr Netanyahu’s right-wing and religious bloc nor the opposition has a clear route to 61 seats. That could mean weeks or even months of bargaining among the dozen or so parties expected to enter parliament, with smaller parties that only just clear the threshold potentially deciding the outcome.
Who is challenging Netanyahu
Mr Netanyahu, 77, leads the Likud party and has been prime minister for more than 19 years across several terms since 1996. His main challenger is Gadi Eisenkot, a former chief of staff of the Israeli military who now heads the centrist Yashar party. Mr Eisenkot sat as an observer in the war cabinet after October 7 but quit in June 2024, saying the government had no clear war strategy. Former prime minister Naftali Bennett is leading the B’Yachad alliance, which includes Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid.
In a post on X shortly before voting began, Mr Eisenkot urged Israelis to use their ballot to replace what he called “the government of October 7th”. Mr Netanyahu has sought to paint his rivals as a left-leaning bloc that would have to depend on Arab-led parties for a majority. President Isaac Herzog, who cast his vote in the morning, appealed for a large turnout.
Why it matters
The campaign has centred on accountability for the security failures before the October 7 attack, the exemption of ultra-Orthodox seminary students from military service, and the government’s push to overhaul the judiciary. There has been little debate on the conduct of the war in Gaza, where the local health ministry says more than 74,000 Palestinians have been killed. Most leading contenders share hard-line positions on security and oppose a Palestinian state for now.
The stakes are also personal for Mr Netanyahu. He is on trial on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust, which he denies, and the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant against him in November 2024 over alleged war crimes in Gaza, which Israel rejects. US President Donald Trump has publicly backed his re-election.
What happens next
Counting will follow the close of polls, with the final tally expected by October 30 and official results due to be published on November 4. President Herzog will then consult party leaders and ask the lawmaker seen as most likely to succeed to form a government. That person gets 28 days to build a coalition, with a possible 14-day extension.
