Israel votes in election that will decide Netanyahu's future after Gaza and Iran wars

Israelis began voting on Tuesday in a general election that will decide whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's longest-serving leader, wins a new mandate or is forced from office after a term dominated by the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack, the war in Gaza and a direct military confrontation with Iran. The vote for the 26th Knesset is the first Israeli parliamentary election held on its originally scheduled date, rather than after an early collapse of the government, since 1988.

Polling stations opened at 7 a.m. local time and are due to close at 10 p.m., with exit polls expected shortly afterward and official results not certified for several days. The election was set in motion when the 25th Knesset completed a full four-year term and formally dissolved on July 17, according to the Israel Democracy Institute's election tracker, ending the run of five consecutive snap elections that had destabilized Israeli politics between 2018 and 2022.

A tight, fractured race

The vote is run by the Central Elections Committee, the statutory body chaired by Supreme Court Deputy President Noam Sohlberg. Roughly 7.33 million Israelis are eligible to vote, choosing among 38 registered party lists for the Knesset's 120 seats. A party needs 3.25 percent of the national vote to enter parliament, and a governing coalition needs 61 seats — a threshold no single party has ever reached on its own.

Polling in the campaign's final weeks showed neither Netanyahu's Likud-led, religious and nationalist bloc nor the opposition with a clear path to that majority. Likud held 32 seats when the Knesset dissolved and has pursued a merger with Gideon Sa'ar's New Hope; former prime ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid merged their parties into a single list called Together; and former military chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot's new party, Yashar, drew strong enough support in some surveys to edge out Likud for the single largest share of the vote, without any bloc approaching a majority on its own.

Among the smaller lists expected to hold the balance of power are Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinu and Bezalel Smotrich's Religious Zionism, each holding six and seven seats respectively at dissolution and now running jointly with Moshe Feiglin's Zehut; Itamar Ben-Gvir's Otzma Yehudit, with six; the ultra-Orthodox Shas, with 11, and United Torah Judaism, with seven; Benny Gantz's Blue and White, with eight; the Labor-Meretz merger known as the Democrats, with four; and the Arab-led Ra'am and Joint List factions, with five seats each. Should no bloc reach 61 seats after the votes are tallied, parties get 28 days — extendable by two more weeks — to negotiate a coalition before the country would be forced to vote again.

A referendum shadowed by war and a corruption trial

The campaign unfolded against the backdrop of the deadliest period in Israel's recent history. The October 7, 2023, attack and the ensuing war in Gaza fractured the national unity government formed in its aftermath, and Otzma Yehudit briefly quit the coalition last January to protest a ceasefire deal in Gaza before rejoining after that truce collapsed. Netanyahu has built his re-election pitch largely around the subsequent military campaign against Iran, casting the vote as a verdict on his handling of the country's security.

He is doing so while still a defendant in a long-running corruption trial; he asked President Isaac Herzog in December for a pardon, opening a process that could end his legal jeopardy through clemency, a plea agreement or some combination of both, regardless of Tuesday's outcome.

Turnout abroad suggested an unusually energized electorate. Israeli diplomats, embassy staff and their eligible relatives cast ballots at 101 polling stations inside 99 missions worldwide, and the Central Elections Committee recorded 4,218 votes out of 4,863 eligible voters — an 86.7 percent turnout, up 17.1 percentage points from the 69.6 percent recorded in the 2022 election, according to Ynetnews and the Times of Israel.

A campaign marked by threats and violence

The run-up to the vote was unusually volatile even by the standards of Israeli politics. On October 22, as Netanyahu's motorcade passed through Jerusalem's Mahane Yehuda market during a procession marking his 77th birthday, someone threw a glass bottle toward the convoy; security personnel broke through a barricade searching for the culprit while the motorcade continued on, according to the Jerusalem Post, while Israeli outlet Arutz Sheva described the object as a firebomb. Days earlier, a car carrying Amcha Yisrael candidate Fleur Hassan-Nahoum was struck by a rock in the West Bank village of Turmus Ayya, and salt shakers were thrown at Bennett during a campaign stop in Bnei Brak, injuring two of his staff members.

Lieberman and former general and Democrats leader Yair Golan both said they had received explicit death threats, which Yisrael Beiteinu reported to police, and Israel's domestic security service, the Shin Bet, reportedly declined to assign Eisenkot a state-funded protective detail, though it authorized his private security to carry weapons.

President Herzog addressed the mounting tension repeatedly in the campaign's final months. At a memorial ceremony for assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on October 22, he warned that online threats against politicians had become disturbingly routine and said Israeli society could not treat an election as a civil war. Weeks earlier, he had already cautioned publicly that the vote itself faced dangers beyond ordinary political competition.

Herzog warned of "threats to the integrity of the elections, both internal and external," as the country headed toward the October vote.

The warning tracked with public anxiety recorded before the vote: a survey cited in the Israel Democracy Institute's own briefing on safeguarding the 2026 election's integrity found that 49.4 percent of Jewish Israeli respondents expected some form of foreign interference in the vote, even as the report found Israel still lacks a single government body responsible for countering such campaigns in the digital sphere.

What a new government would inherit

Whoever ultimately forms a government will immediately confront unfinished business from the current term: the future of the ceasefire arrangements governing Gaza, the durability of the truce reached with Iran after last year's direct strikes, and a battle over mandatory military conscription for ultra-Orthodox men that has repeatedly threatened to topple governing coalitions. Legal questions also hang over the result, not least because of Netanyahu's own case. Israel's courts — including the Supreme Court, whose sitting deputy president chairs the Central Elections Committee itself, per the court's official docket and rulings portal — are likely to remain entangled in the contest's aftermath regardless of who wins.

Demographic data compiled by Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics underpins the electoral map both sides are fighting over, from the growing ultra-Orthodox and Arab-Israeli populations to an electorate reshaped by years of displacement from border communities hit hardest during the war.

Exit polls are expected within an hour of the 10 p.m. close of voting, though Israeli election nights have a history of diverging sharply from the final certified tally once absentee, military and double-envelope ballots are counted. Official results are due by November 4. If, as most pre-election surveys suggested, neither bloc wins a clear majority, the coming weeks will be dominated not by the vote count itself but by the horse-trading among Haredi, nationalist, centrist and Arab-led parties that will determine whether Netanyahu remains prime minister or hands power to a rival coalition for the first time since 2021.