A man rides a bicycle past a television channel advertisement featuring Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (R) and his main rival, opposition candidate Gadi Eisenkot, ahead of Israel's general election, in Ramat Gan, Israel, Sept. 23, 2026 (AP Photo)
As Israel gears up for its first elections since Hamas’ 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.
According to the Israel Democracy Institute, over 60 percent of Israelis say their attitudes toward Oct. 7 are a central factor in whom to vote for. That number jumps to 68 percent among the Jewish
majority; Arab voters are most concerned with a crime wave in their communities.
There is little discussion of Palestinians
Largely missing from the Israeli public discourse is any discussion of the dire situation in Gaza or the fate of the Palestinians.
Israeli leaders have said little about the unprecedented death toll in Gaza, the humanitarian catastrophe and the lack of reconstruction. Instead, they have focused largely on the country’s pain over the Hamas attack.
There is almost no mention of peace talks, and even Netanyahu’s challengers largely oppose the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, the international community’s preferred solution for the decades-old conflict.
