Israel September 2026-

February 2026
The Battle to Oust Bibi: Israel’s 2026 Elections
As the Israeli Knesset elections draw near, with all 120 seats up for grabs, the fight for Israel’s future is about to begin. Israel’s right-wing government, led by long-standing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who for all but 18 months of the last 17 years has been the country’s Prime Minister, has become the most unpopular Netanyahu-led government in Israel’s history.
Held against the backdrop of the traumatic events of the 7th October 2023 and the subsequent conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon, and with Iran, this election will be a crucial factor in determining Israel’s future, the success of the fragile ceasefire in Gaza and the prospect for a two-state solution to get back on track.
Israel’s proportional representation electoral system leads to numerous parties contesting elections, with outcomes hinged on nationwide party performances and the ensuing coalition negotiations that follow.
With growing anger towards Netanyahu’s government, Israel’s political spectrum has seen a resurgence of centrist and centre-left parties, with Yair Lapid’s centrist Yesh Atid, Yair Golan’s centre-left Democrats, and Naftali Bennett’s big-tent Bennett 2026 leading the charge for change
Parties must clear a threshold of 3.25 percent of the national vote in order to win seats in the Knesset. If a party doesn’t clear that bar, its votes are effectively wasted.
The highly proportional system makes it near-impossible for any party to win a majority: since its first general election in 1949, Israel has always been ruled by coalition governments. The electoral system also makes it easier for new parties to suddenly emerge, rapidly shifting the political landscape  —Labour Friends of Israel

16 October
Low Expectations for Israel’s Election
Shlomo Ben-Ami
Benjamin Netanyahu has led Israel into a trap in which ever-increasing strategic commitments are outstripping the productive base that finances them, and the goodwill on which its alliances depend is being destroyed. While a new government would not transform Israeli foreign policy, it could begin to drag Israel out of its morass.
(Project Syndicate) In Hungary’s general election in April, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s right-wing populist government was toppled not by some leftist opposition, but rather by a center-right party committed to fighting corruption and restoring democracy. As Israel heads to the polls on October 27, a similar shift is by far the best outcome one can reasonably hope for, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s extremist government replaced by a decent, law-abiding administration. A radically new foreign policy will remain out of reach.
In a “normal” democracy, a leader like Netanyahu would have been forced to resign or toppled by popular protests long ago. After all, it was under his watch that Israel endured the horrific terrorist attack of October 7, 2023, and under his orders that Israel has undertaken multiple prolonged wars—marked by war crimes—which exhausted its capacities and alienated the international community.
But Israel is not a normal democracy, and its voters have never been particularly concerned about accountability. While Netanyahu does not command broad-based support—polls largely rule out the possibility that his bloc will retain a majority—his defeat is far from guaranteed. This has little to do with policy: while liberals sometimes present programs and proposals, Israeli elections have always been less about policy platforms than about culture and tribal identity.
Israeli Settlers Launch a Coordinated Attack in the West Bank
Netanyahu vowed to investigate the incident but stopped short of condemning settler violence.
(Foreign Policy</em) Dozens of masked Israeli settlers carried out a mass coordinated attack on Palestinian civilians harvesting olives in eight West Bank villages on Friday, injuring at least 20 people and setting olive groves on fire. Among those targeted in the assault was Washington Post photojournalist Heidi Levine, who was wearing a protective vest marked “PRESS” when she was attacked. …
Friday’s assault on Levine “is the latest in a long line of violent attacks by Israeli settlers against journalists and other civilians in the occupied West Bank,” the Israeli Foreign Press Association said in a statement. “Yet our repeated calls for action to confront this lawlessness have been ignored by Israeli authorities.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly brushed off Israeli settler attacks on Palestinians, and some of his cabinet ministers have pushed for the expansion of Israeli settlements, which are considered illegal under international law. Between January and August of this year, the United Nations documented more than 1,600 settler attacks in the West Bank and at least 76 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces or settlers.
… It is unclear whether Netanyahu’s hesitance to condemn Israeli settler attacks will impact the country’s upcoming parliamentary elections. However, Israel’s opposition leaders have already seized on Friday’s incident to denounce the prime minister’s hold on power.
“The Jewish terror attacks, this time also against the ‘Washington Post’ photographer, are not a failure of the government—they are the government’s policy,” Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid wrote on X.

14 October
This Is Israel’s Haredi Election
The country’s coming election has become focused on the status of the country’s ultra-Orthodox at wartime.
By Anchal Vohra, Foreign Policy columnist
Israel’s ultra-Orthodox community is the country’s fastest-growing population group, with an average fertility rate of around 6.5 children per woman. By 2050, nearly 1 in 4 to Israelis is projected to be Haredi.
Those facts have been known for some time. But as a national election approaches on Oct. 27, they have become the focus of Israeli politics. As Israelis prepare to vote, many are asking themselves whether the growing Haredi community is adding to the country’s troubles—and whether anything should be done about that. Their answer to that question could determine the election outcome.

8-12 October
NAZA: Netanyahu orders identification and prosecution of film’s interviewees
Israeli PM calls for criminal investigation into soldiers and officers interviewed in Guardian-produced documentary
Israel promotes film that mimics NAZA documentary
Embassies post links to hastily produced online film echoing style of real Guardian documentary about mass killings of Gaza civilians
(The Guardian) The Israeli government is promoting an online film project that mimics the style of NAZA, the award-winning documentary that details Israel’s mass killings of civilians in Gaza, in an attempt to counter the real film’s findings.
The real documentary, directed by the Oscar-winning film-makers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, and produced by the Guardian, is in cinemas and will be shown in more than 50 countries.
The Israeli government has denounced the film and announced plans to strip Abraham and Szor of their citizenship, accusing them of treason.

10 October
In three years, Israel’s war on Gaza hasn’t just changed the Middle East, it’s changed the world
Steve Bloomfield
A whirlpool of violence has engulfed everywhere from Lebanon to Yemen. Meanwhile, the west has destroyed any political authority it once had
(The Guardian) There was a world before 7 October, 2023, and now there is a world after. …
Three years on from 7 October, both Israel and Gaza have changed beyond recognition. But the consequences of Hamas’s attack and Israel’s brutal response, which has killed more than 73,000 Palestinians, including 21,000 children, have spread far wider.
Under the pretext of protecting its own borders, Israel has launched wars and military offensives across the region, sending troops into Syria; effectively annexing parts of southern Lebanon, deploying the same tactics there that it used in Gaza; and starting, with the US, an unwinnable war with Iran that has spiralled into a regional conflict affecting all six Gulf states.
The Iran war has sparked a new conflict between the Houthis in Yemen and Saudi Arabia, which this week triggered a mutual defence pact with Pakistan and Turkey, dragging two other countries into the maelstrom. Across the Red Sea, some of the same combatants are involved in the war in Sudan and a fresh conflict inside Ethiopia.
More than a dozen countries across two continents are now entangled in a rising number of wars, with overlapping participants and numerous competing interests.
But there is something else, more insidious, that has changed. The rule of international law, tenuous as it was, has been openly replaced by military might. In 2022, western leaders – building a coalition rightly opposed to Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine – made moral appeals based on the violation of international law. In Gaza, they encouraged and supported Israel, even when it was clear that the rules were being broken. That hypocrisy has not gone unnoticed, not just in the global south but among many millions of citizens in the west.
We have watched this happen in real time. Despite the ban on international journalists, anyone with a phone knew what was happening in Gaza from the early days of Israel’s response. Hundreds of Palestinian journalists have reported on the bombing of hospitals and schools, the bombing of cafes and wells, the killings at food distribution points, the deaths of children and babies. War crimes have never before been broadcast in real time, relentlessly, every hour of every day, around the world.
Gaza has also changed how wars are fought. Israel has pioneered the use of AI to select targets, accelerating our descent into a future for which we are unprepared. …

9 October
Israel Denounces the Decision to Award the Nobel Peace Prize to Navi Pillay
(NYT) Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu led Israel’s denunciations on Friday of the decision to award the Nobel Peace Prize to Navi Pillay, a human rights lawyer who was drawn into the international spotlight last year when a United Nations commission she chaired found that Israel was committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
In a statement, Mr. Netanyahu called the decision by the Norwegian Nobel Committee misguided and said it had “lost its moral compass.” He also condemned Ms. Pillay’s work, accusing her of being prejudiced against Jews.
The Israeli foreign ministry, in a post on social media, denounced it as “the grotesque weaponization of an award to legitimize anti-Israel hatred and prejudice.”

9 October
‘Self-imposed irrelevance’: why the EU is failing to act on growing public criticism of Israel
While Israel’s actions against Palestinians intensify public anger, the bloc remains paralysed along familiar fault lines
(The Guardian) A meeting of EU foreign affairs ministers on Monday is likely to showcase the bloc’s stasis in policy towards Israel – a stalemate that is at odds with rising public criticism in Europe of Israel’s government.
A survey of 10 European countries, including Spain, France and Sweden, found large majorities of people had a negative opinion of Israel. …
Israel is facing ever deeper isolation in the theatre of public opinion. …
Gaza remains a humanitarian catastrophe, with people facing acute shortages of water, nutritious food and medical equipment and medicines, while contending with disease, unemployment, economic collapse and the threat of death or injury. Israel’s airstrikes continue: the death toll includes 1,400 Palestinians killed since a ceasefire was declared a year ago.
The EU talks on the Middle East will focus on the conflicts in Iran and Yemen, but ministers will also discuss the situation in Gaza and the West Bank in the context of elections in Israel on 27 October and the first legislative elections in Palestine in 20 years, which are expected by late November.
… Among a third, larger group of countries in the middle are several, such as France and the Netherlands, that are increasingly critical of the Netanyahu government’s conduct in Gaza and its plans to build the vast E1 settlement, which threatens to critically damage the two-state solution.

7 October
Ian Bremmer: Three years after 10/7, Israel looks backward and forward
The debate over Netanyahu’s track record in responding to 10/7 will shape the race, with 68% of Jewish voters stating that 10/7 will be “central” to their vote. Recent headlines have been damaging to Netanyahu on this front, with reporting emerging that UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed warned Netanyahu before 10/7 about the risk of a Hamas attack—a charge that Netanyahu has emphatically denied.
The political implications of 10/7 have also stretched far beyond Israel’s borders, as the global perception of the country has cratered in the wake of humanitarian outcry over the war in Gaza, with a median of 67% of respondents in 36 countries viewing Israel unfavorably. The growing international anger at Israel has been accompanied by a disquieting spike in antisemitism, with last year featuring “the highest number of victims of antisemitic attacks in more than three decades,” according to Tel Aviv University. Netanyahu has long sought to link criticism of Israel’s actions—especially those connected to alleged Israeli war crimes—with antisemitism, which has arguably added further fuel to Israel’s rising internal polarization. Polarization in Israel has grown so acute that it is now considered by the public to be a more of a threat to the country than Iran.

Scars from Oct. 7 fuel deep divisions over Netanyahu ahead of Israeli election
(AP) — As Israel gears up for its first elections since the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023 attack, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his opponents are putting it at the heart of their campaigns.
Nearly every poster, stump speech or televised debate seems to reference the attack, which has scarred the country and remains fresh in the minds of voters. Three years on, the worst security failure in Israel’s history now threatens to end the career of its longest-serving prime minister.
“October 7 is kind of a framework for the entire political discussion that is going on,” said Tamar Hermann, an expert on Israeli public opinion at the Israel Democracy Institute, a Jerusalem think tank. “All of us are post-traumatic in a way.”
Netanyahu’s opponents want him to pay for the failures that led to the deadliest day in Israel’s 78-year history and plunged the country into a series of inconclusive wars. His defenders say Netanyahu was betrayed by the military establishment and that he has led Israel through a dramatic rebound from its darkest hour.

1 October
NAZA film-makers say they spoke to more than 100 sources about Israeli actions in Gaza
(The Guardian) The team behind the award-winning film NAZA, which details the Israeli military’s targeting policies in Gaza and its alleged acceptance of high numbers of civilian deaths, have revealed they spoke to more than 100 sources with knowledge of the military systems used in the war.
The disclosure came in response to an Israel Defense Forces statement seeking to discredit the documentary.
… “The Guardian stands fully behind the film, which builds on three years of detailed reporting by the Guardian and our partners. Several highly respected news organisations have subsequently confirmed the IDF’s use of AI-driven systems in the Gaza offensive and the loosening of safeguards to protect civilians, including the New York Times, Washington Post and Associated Press.”
While Netanyahu has claimed that Israeli military safeguards have led to one of the lowest civilian-combatant ratios in modern warfare, that has been challenged by the IDF’s own leaked casualty assessments, by the UN’s commission of inquiry in 2024 and research by NGOs including Action on Armed Violence.