Netanyahu fights for survival in Tuesday's Israeli elections

ICC-wanted war criminal and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu enters Tuesday's elections fighting for political survival as former army chief Gadi Eisenkot challenges his security credentials following the October 7, 2023 failures that shattered the premier's decades-long reputation.

Security failures shadow final push

The 77-year-old Likud leader has seen his security-first reputation shattered by the Hamas assault, with Eisenkot channeling public fury over the intelligence lapses to pull neck and neck in recent polling. On the trail, Netanyahu has brandished an endorsement from Donald Trump, warned that hostile powers seek his defeat, and stoked fears that his opponents would deliver a Palestinian state opposed by most Israeli voters. His campaign has plastered the country with posters bearing a single slogan: "Either the Right or Palestine."

Away from the rallies, the premier confronts an International Criminal Court arrest warrant over alleged war crimes in Gaza, a long-running corruption trial, and a multi-front conflict now entering its third year. Netanyahu has sought to use the military campaigns he launched against Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and their Iranian patron — targeted twice by Israeli strikes — to obscure the October security lapse.

On Friday, after Palestinian gunmen wounded five Israelis near Hebron, Netanyahu ordered a West Bank lockdown and vowed to "pursue Hamas terrorists" everywhere, warning: "You have no place to hide."

From Revisionist roots to regional wars

Born in Tel Aviv on October 21, 1949, Netanyahu inherited the Revisionist Zionist ideology of his father Benzion, who served as aide to Zeev Jabotinsky and advocated for a "Greater Israel" stretching to the Jordan River. The premier helped bury the Israeli-Palestinian peace process of the 1990s, opposes a Palestinian state, and promotes annexing parts of the occupied West Bank where Israeli settlements — deemed illegal under international law — continue to expand.

As a young man, he served in an elite commando unit and fought in the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. The defining tragedy of his early life came when his elder brother Yonatan was killed leading the Entebbe hostage-rescue mission in Uganda. "When the news reached me that Yoni had died, I felt as if my life had ended," Netanyahu later wrote.

Raised partly in the United States and educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he became one of Israel's most prominent overseas spokesmen, displaying an ease on American television that remains a hallmark. Elected to parliament in 1988, he seized the Likud leadership in 1993 and scored an upset victory in 1996 to become, at 46, Israel's youngest prime minister. He held office from 1996 to 1999, returned from 2009 to 2021, and won power again in late 2022 by assembling a coalition that brought once-shunned extremist factions into government.

For years, he maintained that Israeli security rested on overwhelming military strength while cultivating a reputation for caution. Adamantly opposed to Palestinian statehood, Netanyahu viewed Hamas rule in Gaza — bankrolled by Qatar — as a mechanism to divide Palestinians and weaken the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority backed by European capitals.

The October 7 attack exposed the collapse of this strategy. As the war widened, Netanyahu began framing the conflict as a generational struggle to reshape the region and sever the grip of Iran's clerical state, repeatedly claiming that he "changed the face of the Middle East".

Rival warns premier 'unfit' as Trump weighs in

Supporters credit him with answering Israel's darkest hour with unprecedented military resolve and confronting Tehran directly — something his predecessors avoided. Critics counter that his policies have trapped the country in intractable conflicts and turned it into an international pariah. Eisenkot has declared that Netanyahu "is unfit to remain in office".

"He spreads hatred, fear and portrays his rivals as enemies of Israel," Eisenkot told public broadcaster Kan.

The premier retains a powerful ally in US President Trump, whom he has called "the greatest friend Israel has ever had" in the White House. Trump delivered his endorsement ten days before the vote, assuring voters that Netanyahu was "the man I want by my side". Polls indicate the Likud leader is unlikely to secure a governing majority alone, though he has defied predictions of his demise for decades.

On Channel 14, a private station that backs him unreservedly, he recently declared that the stakes involve "the continued existence of the Jewish state, and to guarantee that, you must vote for the person who will get the job done". Israelis head to the polls on Tuesday with final surveys showing the two main contenders running neck and neck, leaving both short of the 61 parliamentary seats required to form a government without additional coalition partners.