Most polls put Eisenkot’s camp ahead with no clear coalition path
TEL AVIV, Israel — Israeli voters head to the polls Tuesday in the country’s first national election since the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks. NPR reported that Israelis considered the scheduled vote the most pivotal in the nation’s history and described Netanyahu’s coalition as including far-right, ultranationalist and religious parties. Eisenkot leads a center-right opposition that NPR said promised more diplomacy and less extremism. NPR reported that some Israelis may vote Netanyahu out because he failed to prevent the attack, which the outlet described as the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. Netanyahu’s campaign centers on the wars in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran, which NPR said aim to reshape the Middle East, and he argues that Israel is safer since Oct. 7.
Most polls show Eisenkot’s camp ahead of Netanyahu’s, but the same polls show neither has a clear path to victory because parties must form a coalition controlling a majority in Israel’s parliament. The election could turn on a small number of votes or end in stalemate, forcing a repeat election next year. The result could therefore produce a Netanyahu-led government, an Eisenkot-led government or a stalemate in which Netanyahu remains in power with authority over decisions such as whether to go to war. NPR reported that Netanyahu strongly suggested he wanted to strike Iran again.
Israel does not allow absentee voting, and tens of thousands of expatriates are expected to fly back to cast ballots, with concern about the country’s future driving the return. Israeli lawyer Shoula Romano-Horing flew in from Kansas City, Mo., to vote and said she was backing Netanyahu. “We almost could have been destroyed on Oct. 7,” she said. “This is why I’m voting for Netanyahu, to make Israel so secure and so safe.” Yochai Ben-Haim, who works in renewable energy in California and is flying home for 36 hours just to vote, offered a different view. “The actions of this government cause Israelis in general and Jews in general to be tagged as, you know, mass killers,” he said. “This government is led by extremists that do not represent who we are, and we need to change it.” NPR described Ben-Haim as part of a wider group of Israelis distressed by the global backlash to the wars Netanyahu’s government has waged.
Based on conversations with dozens of Israelis over the preceding several weeks, NPR portrayed a public that was defiant but weary after three years of war and angry at both its enemies and its leaders. The report said many Israelis showed little concern for their Palestinian neighbors’ suffering while carrying trauma from the war Israel has waged. It also described many as resistant to Palestinian independence but opposed to Israeli settlers pushing Palestinians off their land, frustrated by international criticism of the Gaza war and fearful of growing global isolation. The report characterized those pressures as a tug-of-war within Israeli society.
At a recent stump speech, Eisenkot took the stage. He is short with cropped white hair and was wearing all black while speaking to a crowd in Kiryat Gat, a city near the Gaza border that had historically been a conservative Netanyahu stronghold. An accompanying NPR item said Israel would hold elections in the fall and that Eisenkot could be the next prime minister. Eisenkot is the former military chief of staff whom Netanyahu appointed a decade ago. He returned to the public spotlight in the days after Oct. 7 when he joined Netanyahu’s war cabinet. Soon after, Eisenkot’s son was killed as a soldier in the Gaza war; the following day, his nephew was killed there. Eisenkot told the crowd that he began to disagree with Netanyahu’s prosecution of the war three months in. “I saw a deep dysfunction in the decision-making process,” Eisenkot said. “I saw that political and personal considerations were put above everything else.” He has pledged, if he wins, to launch an official national investigation into the security failure of Oct. 7, something Netanyahu has refused to do.
“He’s straight,” said Yair Amar, a longtime Netanyahu voter who said he had switched allegiances to Eisenkot. “Many Israelis wish for a saner future,” Harel said. “For somebody who perhaps is not as charismatic and doesn’t look the part of an American senator, but is one of us and is seen as somebody who sacrificed a lot.” NPR framed the contest as more than a race of conservatives versus liberals or right versus left. It described Eisenkot’s group of politicians as largely right-wing and focused on security, campaigning to enlist religious ultra-Orthodox Jews in the military. NPR reported that Netanyahu resisted the proposal in order to placate his ultra-Orthodox political allies.
NPR reported that Netanyahu had downplayed Israeli settler violence in the West Bank, while his allies campaigned on a pledge to expel Palestinians, which they called “encouraging emigration.” NPR said Netanyahu was campaigning on what he had done in response to external threats, citing the wars in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran as examples of how he had made Israel safer since Oct. 7. “On that darkest of days, our enemies expected us to collapse. Well, we didn’t collapse. Instead, we rose and fought like lions!” Netanyahu said at the United Nations last month.
Over the last three years, NPR reported that Israel had killed the leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran, sent soldiers to capture new territory in the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon and Syria, and fought Houthis in Yemen and militias in Iraq. Netanyahu vows to destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities if he is reelected. He has called the conflicts wars of “no choice,” alongside a “war for truth” in international and social media. Harel said: “We’re entangled in endless wars and this was done on purpose. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. The whole idea is for Israel to keep fighting, because endless wars serve Netanyahu to maintain… a constant state of emergency.”
As the election approached, Israelis were learning more about the events leading to Oct. 7. Throughout 2023, Israelis took to the streets to protest Netanyahu’s government, which NPR described as far-right, and its plan to weaken the judiciary; Netanyahu’s security chiefs warned that regional enemies could take advantage of the domestic turmoil to attack. NPR reported that Israel also received direct warnings that Hamas was planning something large. Palestinian mediator Sufian Abu Zaida said Israel and Hamas had held secret talks for more than a year. When the talks stalled, Hamas’ leader in Gaza asked Abu Zaida to relay a message threatening an “earthquake.” What kind of earthquake was unclear, Abu Zaida said, but he insisted he relayed the warning to Israeli intelligence. The leader of the United Arab Emirates and Egypt’s intelligence chief relayed similar warnings, according to NPR and other media outlets. “All what happened in 7 of October is needless,” Abu Zaida said. An accompanying NPR report, 3 years on, Israelis grapple with reports Netanyahu was warned before Oct. 7 attacks, examined the warning claims.
Nearly 1,200 people were killed when Hamas attacked army bases, residential communities and an outdoor music rave, and 251 people were taken hostage back to Gaza. Netanyahu denies he was warned and has never admitted any kind of responsibility for the security failure. Amos Harel, a defense analyst for the Haaretz newspaper and author of 06:29 – Anatomy of a Failure, which details the Israeli failures to prevent the attack, said Netanyahu’s team moved quickly to shape the public account. “Within days, his PR people were trying to shape the public narrative about events,” Harel said. The attack began that day at 6:29 a.m. Harel said Netanyahu’s strategy was “to shift the blame” to the security services and the military.
For much of the Gaza war, Israeli protesters flooded the streets demanding that Netanyahu strike a deal with Hamas to release Israeli hostages and end the fighting. It took two years — Israel’s longest-ever war — before a hostage deal was reached. Netanyahu said he was seeking Hamas’ total defeat; former officials who worked with him alleged that he prolonged the war for political reasons, a charge he denied. “I’m absolutely convinced that this is what happened,” Harel said. “He felt that if this would move on too fast, then there will be more of a significant public demand for a national commission of inquiry.” NPR reported a great demand among Israelis for an investigation into the attack, like the 9/11 Commission in the United States, and said Netanyahu had blocked one in Israel. Many Israelis grappling with Oct. 7 go to the site of the day’s deadliest attack, where hundreds were killed when Hamas attacked the Nova music festival. The memorial there is a dusty field of plaques and thin poles bearing pictures of smiling young people who were partying when they came under attack. Kati and Meir Zohar, whose 23-year-old daughter Bar was killed there, helped build it with other families. The Zohars said they received no government funding for the effort and no phone call from Netanyahu expressing his condolences. “We are angry,” Kati Zohar said. She believes Netanyahu bears responsibility for what happened to her daughter on Oct. 7 and, like other Israelis, hopes he will face a reckoning for it on election day. “It’s a hope that something will change,” Zohar said. “I hope that someone will come and take his place and be the one who [is] trying to keep this country together.”
The Oct. 7 attack left Israelis in a state of shock. “I think the general line of thinking — not only among decision-makers, not only among ministers of the government, but also among commanders in the field — was that something biblical has happened to us and that something biblical needed to happen in return,” Harel said. NPR reported that Israeli military operations had killed more than 74,000 Palestinians and left most of Gaza destroyed. The report said Israel was facing charges of genocide. Netanyahu faces an international arrest warrant for alleged war crimes, and Israeli soldiers who fought in the war risk arrest in some countries.
Lior, 34, was among the soldiers who fought in the war. “I’m proud of what I did and I know what I did,” he said. “I don’t mind to be in front of a judge.” He spoke on the condition that his last name be withheld to protect his family overseas from harassment because of the nature of his role: he commanded an Israeli sniper unit in Gaza and Lebanon, serving over 500 days in uniform. “When you’re inside Gaza, your life is under danger 24/7. There is shooting, there is booming… sometimes you hear about Hezbollah, Hamas, what they are doing. So your body, your mind is under survival tension 24/7,” Lior said. NPR’s Picture Show also published Photos: What a year of ceasefire in Gaza looks like, a visual report on a year of ceasefire in Gaza. Lior is among the nearly 19,000 Israeli soldiers newly diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder or related illnesses. NPR reported that the condition touched every part of his life: he imagines snipers on the streets, sometimes breaks into tears riding the train, struggles in his sex life, and he and his fiancé broke up. Lior often returns to one memory from Gaza: his order to shoot and kill a man he described as a Hamas terrorist, who was standing next to the man’s child in a place where the man should not have been. “Unfortunately, yeah, the kid saw his father dying in front of him,” Lior said.
Lior said he did not regret any of his decisions to open fire. “To be honest, in my opinion, I don’t have any mercy of people in Gaza. I know what’s going on there. I know of the poverty, I know about the lack of water, electricity. I don’t have any mercy on them,” Lior said. “When you see things with your own eyes and you remember what happened on the 7th of October, I’m not forgiving for that.” On the question of whether innocent people existed in Gaza, Lior said: “You know, my Jewish identity (is) saying that I’m sure there is, but…I don’t see it that way. That’s what I told you about the kid.” “If he have the chance, he will kill me.” Lior is also among nearly 300,000 young Israeli military veterans ordered to leave their civilian lives and serve as reservist soldiers after Oct. 7.
More than 67 percent of Israelis in a July 2025 poll said they were not very troubled about the suffering of people in Gaza, while more than 60 percent in an August 2025 poll said they believed there were no innocent people in Gaza. NPR reported that mainstream Israeli media had reinforced that view. “There are no uninvolved civilians in Gaza,” Israeli reporter Almog Boker said on leading news network Channel 12 early last year. A separate NPR photo feature, Skeletons in their clothing: Recovering bodies from the rubble in Gaza, documented the recovery of bodies from rubble in Gaza.
Anat Saragusti, a veteran journalist who reported from Gaza in the 1990s and early 2000s for Channel 12, said from her Tel Aviv apartment: “I tried to cover Gaza as if I was living in a foreign country, to show the complexity of life, to show different stories. To show the Israeli audience that Gaza is not what they thought and think now, you know, a black hole of terrorists.” NPR’s historical account said that 20 years ago, after Hamas took an Israeli soldier captive in Gaza, Israel practically sealed Gaza shut to Israeli journalists and to all Israelis. Hamas later took control of Gaza, Israel imposed a blockade, and years of Hamas rocket fire into Israel and Israeli retaliation followed. Since Oct. 7, NPR reported, most Israeli media chose not to show what Palestinian journalists were reporting day after day from Gaza: tens of thousands of men, women and children killed; forced displacement; starvation; and the misery of trying to survive. “The majority of the Israeli journalists didn’t do one story, you know, not even one story was done on Gaza… to see whether what these Palestinian journalists are claiming is true,” Saragusti said. “They were afraid of the pushback by the audience if they dare say something about Gaza.” Harel, who writes a regular column for the Haaretz newspaper, said the nation’s continuous war trauma also afflicted Israeli media. “We were so busy with our pain and our suffering and worrying about the fate of the hostages — hundreds of hostages were held at that time by Hamas — that we didn’t focus on what we did to the other side,” he said.
NPR described the Israeli-occupied West Bank as one place where even veterans of Israel’s military and security establishment said what Palestinians were enduring had gone too far. Since Oct. 7, settler violence toward Palestinians had increased, settlers had seized more land with support from the military and Netanyahu’s government, and the government had approved more than 100 new Jewish settlements in the West Bank, a record number. An accompanying NPR report said its reporter witnessed the largest detention of West Bank activists in a decade. Cabinet Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced the 104th settlement in July, saying, “We are making a historic revolution,” and that it “would prevent the establishment of a terror state in the heart of Israel.” NPR reported that retired Israeli military general Yaakov “Mendy” Or leads groups of former Israeli military and security officials on tours of Palestinian communities in the West Bank to show them the radical changes that have occurred over the previous three years. On a recent tour, he brought them to Umm al-Kheir, a Palestinian village surrounded by desert hills, where Israeli settlers had set up trailer homes immediately outside a Palestinian family’s property. Palestinian activist Eid Hatlin said settlers had placed barbed wire in the family’s yard and blocked the family’s outdoor bathroom, and that the Israeli army had blocked the path to their sheep. “This is nasty. This is evil,” Ari Shuali, a former senior Israeli intelligence official on the tour, said. “I don’t believe that we as a people became such kind of unhuman behavior. I’m an Israeli. I’m a proud Israeli and I’m ashamed to be an Israeli [at] the same time.” NPR reported that Shuali’s reaction was one reason some Israelis, including him, wanted to vote Netanyahu out.
If Netanyahu loses, Eisenkot has spoken of acting against settler expansion and violence against Palestinians in the West Bank and of reaching diplomatic agreements in the wars Netanyahu has kept open. He has cautioned, however, that he would not withdraw troops from Lebanon and Gaza anytime soon. “Truth be told,” he told the crowd, “it will take a lot of time.” On the conflict with the Palestinians, Eisenkot said he “never said the solution was two states for two peoples.” NPR explained that this referred to the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, an approach advocated by the U.S. and most of the world for decades, and said Eisenkot wanted Israel to preserve possibilities for a future solution. NPR reported that after Oct. 7, Israelis did not want to discuss a Palestinian state. Harel said the Israeli public was not ready to discuss one. “It’s not something that the Israeli public can swallow at this time,” he said. “More and more people suspect that the Arabs, the Palestinians, are out to kill us and that the world is out to get us. And there’s less support for any kind of concessions because people keep bringing up Oct. 7.”
Anat Ben-Ari and Lior expressed different views about the possibility of peace. Ben-Ari, a high school theater teacher who came to hear Eisenkot speak, said, “I’m trusting him on the military level, but is it enough?” She was almost nervous voicing what she called an unpopular opinion: she wants him to forge peace agreements. “The only way to end war — all the history says that — is by agreements, is by people talking to people, even enemies. Mostly enemies,” Ben-Ari said. “I think we should also pay the price for peace in order for less people to die here and not always live on our swords.” Lior expressed a more pessimistic view. “There will always be an enemy, so I think we will always be in a war. We [will] always live on our sword,” he said. “It will always be.”
Israeli voters now consider two different visions for their country, NPR reported: whether Israel should fight to regain the world’s acceptance or increase its neighbors’ deterrence. Israeli author Micah Goodman, who has written about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and previously served as an unofficial adviser to Israeli prime ministers, said Israelis yearn for both. “Israelis want to be feared and to be loved,” Goodman said. “The problem is that you have two reputations you need to protect, but you can’t.” He contrasted the reputations Israelis sought: “In the Middle East, you wanna have a certain kind of reputation. You want to be seen as unpredictable and a little crazy. Like, don’t mess with us… and in the West, you want to be seen as a Norwegian, nice, sweet country playing by the rules, predictable.” Goodman said Israelis made their choice after Oct. 7. “After Oct. 7, the Middle East didn’t fear us and you have to restore fear. But everything we did to restore fear eroded the love.”
NPR’s report was written by Daniel Estrin, with additional reporting by Itay Stern, Abu Bakr Bashir and Michael Levitt.