Polls opened Tuesday across Israel in what is being widely described as the most consequential election in the country's history - a phrase that, historically speaking, has rarely preceded a calm and uneventful period. It is the first election since the Hamas-led attacks of 7 October 2023, Israel's subsequent destruction of Gaza, and the launch of its war with the US against Iran.
Most polling shows Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition will lose its majority in the 120-seat Knesset. The opposition bloc, meanwhile, will probably also fall short of the 61 seats needed to form a government - a result that would be described by optimists as a hung parliament and by everyone else as Tuesday.
For Netanyahu, 76, who has led the most far-right government in Israel's history, the stakes are both political and personal. He is on trial for corruption in three separate cases, despite interventions from Donald Trump, who called for a pre-emptive pardon in the long-running saga and even wrote to Israeli President Isaac Herzog on Netanyahu's behalf. The cases are ongoing, presumably because nobody has yet tried simply writing them a strongly worded letter.
It was on Netanyahu's watch that Hamas militants broke out from Gaza three years ago to kill nearly 1,200 people, the majority of them civilians, on the deadliest day in Israel's history. This election is widely seen as a referendum on Netanyahu's leadership since those attacks.
The IDF's globally condemned assault on Gaza, which has killed at least 75,000 people and been deemed a genocide by a UN commission, academics, legal scholars and Israeli and international rights groups, has left Israel a pariah on the world stage. Three years of regional conflict followed the 7 October attacks, including this year's war on Iran, which sparked an ongoing global energy crisis and has killed thousands of people, mainly in Lebanon and Iran.
Under Netanyahu's government there has also been an unprecedented, aggressive surge of deadly extremist settler violence to bolster Israeli control in the occupied West Bank, as settler militants and their political backers - who have propped up Netanyahu's government - exploited their seat at the cabinet table and expanded with impunity. Settlement expansion has been a key feature of Netanyahu's re-election campaign, and is also a driving force behind Israel's growing international isolation, with many of its traditional allies condemning "settler terrorists" and announcing plans to impose sanctions. Campaigning on the thing that is isolating you internationally is, at minimum, a bold strategy.
More than 12,000 polling stations are opening across the country. In Jerusalem, some voters were lined up before polls even opened at 7am, ready to cast their ballots - an enthusiasm usually reserved for concert tickets and, occasionally, bakery openings.
Just over 7 million Jewish Israelis and 1.7 million Palestinian citizens of Israel will be voting on Tuesday.
The main opposition candidate is Gadi Eisenkot, a former general who has been called the man who is everything Benjamin Netanyahu is not. To Israelis he is both menschy (decent) and schlumpy (unkempt), his crumpled appearance contrasting with Netanyahu's hair rinse, makeup and obsessive need to control his media depiction. In the Israeli commentator Anshel Pfeffer's framing, he is the anti-Bibi among a roster of wanna-Bibis.
In an era of Israeli politics defined by betrayals, dirty tricks and public and private smears, Eisenkot's brand is rectitude. He only entered politics four years ago, and the name of his party - Yashar - means "straight" or "honest." On key issues, though, an Israel under Eisenkot may not look very different, as he has been non-committal on crucial matters including the two-state solution and Israeli settlement of the occupied West Bank.
For many voters, Eisenkot's appeal is less about ideology than the vibe around him. Key to that appeal, said Dahlia Scheindlin, an Israeli pollster and political analyst, is his "very modest background." While Netanyahu is the son of a Polish-born academic, Eisenkot's family were Mizrahi Jews from Morocco. He joined the army as an infantryman and worked his way through the ranks to become the Israeli military's chief of staff.
On the domestic front, Eisenkot is pushing for a full investigation of the intelligence failures that allowed Hamas's deadly 7 October 2023 attack. More divisive is his support for the end of the military draft exemption for the ultra-Orthodox, long a source of friction in Israeli society.
On the biggest issues, not least a two-state solution that would create a Palestinian state, he is ambiguous. "I've never said that the solution is two states for two peoples," Eisenkot said on the campaign trail. "There is a very deep religious-national conflict here, and anyone who thinks an agreement can be reached now is gravely mistaken." On Jewish settlements in the West Bank he is also evasive: he opposes the planned E1 settlement block seen as a potential obstacle to any future Palestinian state, but he supports settlement in general.
Where Eisenkot separates himself from the current government is over Netanyahu's decision to place the far-right, pro-settler minister Bezalel Smotrich in charge of the occupied West Bank, where a surge of settler violence has prompted widespread international condemnation and sanctions. Eisenkot has said he would immediately "reverse" that situation and put the army back in charge of the West Bank.
"What Eisenkot and the rest are basically saying," said Prof Yossi Mekelberg of the Chatham House thinktank, "is we'll be better CEOs. We'll manage the country better, not take it in a different direction … They are not really talking about the Palestinian issue."
Eisenkot is unequivocally not a dove on the use of military force. As Israel's northern front commander during the 2006 second Lebanon war, he was the architect of the notorious Dahiya doctrine, promising that Israel would wield "disproportionate power … and cause immense damage and destruction" - a policy that would see its fullest expression in the current Gaza war. On Gaza, he has been more of a military realist, insisting two years ago that Israel was unlikely to win "total victory" over Hamas, and calling for a strategy that prioritised the lives of hostages still held by Hamas. His son Gal Meir Eisenkot, 25, died of his wounds in late 2023 after an operation in Gaza to recover the bodies of Israeli hostages.
Observers say an Eisenkot administration would be likely to crack down on settler violence in the West Bank - though they wonder if it would go much further.
Eisenkot has already been out greeting voters at a polling station in Ofakim, in Israel's south. The former army chief of staff spent four decades rising through the ranks of Israel's military and now leads the largest opposition party, Yashar. Ofakim was one of the communities attacked by Hamas on 7 October 2023, and Eisenkot's visit was likely aimed at reminding voters of the security failures ahead of that attack - and of Netanyahu's refusal to launch a state commission of inquiry into them.
Domestically, the coalition formed by Netanyahu has taken aim at democratic institutions, including the supreme court. Many Israelis have described this election as the most consequential in their country's history. The polls are open, the queues have formed, and the results - whenever they arrive - will presumably be described as historic too.