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Pro-Netanyahu commentators have drawn a direct line to a 1981 ethnic slur widely credited with tipping that race to Menachem Begin. The comparison doesn't hold up as cleanly as it sounds.
With a third US carrier moving toward the region and oil prices up 46 percent since February's strikes, security analysts say another round with Iran is likely without a diplomatic breakthrough, even if the timing stays inconvenient for two elections.
Ten arrests after a weekend of settler violence is a bigger law-enforcement response than this pattern has usually drawn, but the same reporting shows fresh incidents continuing even as the suspects were being detained.
Ben Gvir's claim that Netanyahu privately promised Europe he'd be dropped from the next government reads less like a real coalition threat and more like a campaign maneuver aimed at his own base.
A brand-new ultra-Orthodox list threatens to split the religious vote just enough to fall short of the threshold, and Netanyahu appears more worried about wasted votes than about losing Haredi support outright.
While regulators focus on labeling AI-generated campaign videos, experts say the real danger is chatbots quietly feeding voters manipulated answers about candidates and parties, a risk Israel's rules barely touch.
The national security minister says Netanyahu privately promised European officials that Otzma Yehudit would be left out of any future coalition, an accusation Likud has pushed back on just over a week before the vote.
A joint police, Shin Bet and IDF operation detained 10 Israeli suspects at dawn Monday over the weekend violence that injured a Washington Post photojournalist and targeted European diplomats near Taybeh.
A presidential endorsement makes for a strong campaign video, but on its own it does not move seats in a parliamentary election. Here's what it can and can't do for the prime minister with nine days to go.
The images of protesters blocking a highway over draft-dodger arrests make for striking television, but the real story is what the standoff reveals about the coalition math awaiting whoever wins on October 27.
Eisenkot's Yashar has opened a lead in the polls, turnout among Israelis abroad is up sharply, and still no credible survey shows either bloc reaching 61 seats. Here's why the numbers keep pointing to deadlock.
Saudi airstrikes on Yemen's Saada province reportedly killed nine people including children, while a Houthi projectile wounded six in Saudi Arabia and a Saudi military helicopter went down near the border.
The visit to Taybeh came as Yesh Din counted at least 170 settler attacks on Palestinians since late September, and as Washington's own ambassador attended a settler conference the same day.
With nine days left before Israel's national election, the US president threw his full weight behind the sitting prime minister, warning that any alternative leader would leave Washington to confront Iran alone.
A faculty working group's eight-page report on campus antisemitism at the University of Pittsburgh is facing pushback for being compiled without input from the roughly 1,400 Jewish students on campus.
In a rare two-hour briefing with Israeli reporters nine days before the election, the prime minister laid out his security pitch, insisting regime change in Iran is nearly complete and that reports of settler attacks are overblown.
A new report from Tel Aviv University's Institute for National Security Studies argues that Israeli policy choices, not just the war itself, are feeding a rise in antisemitism and splitting Jewish communities abroad.
European officials are calling for arrests after a convoy carrying Belgian, French and Polish diplomats was attacked near Taybeh, the latest in a string of settler incidents during the olive harvest season.
Days after parliament confirmed Mehrdad Akhlaghi as defense minister, he warned Washington that any renewed attack on Iran would bring serious consequences for the US and its allies in the region.
Nine days before the election, the government cut education, health and welfare budgets to pay for urgent defense procurement, while leaving coalition funds untouched, drawing sharp criticism from the opposition.
A community that once numbered up to 20,000 has dwindled to roughly 20 people still in the country, but renewed Israel-Lebanon contacts and a prisoner release have put Lebanon's Jewish history back in the spotlight.
Heidi Levine underwent surgery on a severely damaged finger after settler extremists attacked her in the West Bank, as the US pressed Israel to crack down on the violence and press groups demanded accountability.
With 38 parties running, roughly 7.33 million eligible voters, and polls showing neither major bloc near a majority, the smaller parties that clear the 3.25 percent threshold are likely to decide who ends up forming the next government.
Dozens of Haredi demonstrators shut down Route 4 near the Yavne Interchange after two yeshiva students were jailed for failing to enlist, reviving a fight the High Court has pushed the government to resolve for years.
The prime minister called a Channel 14 commentator's remark about his chief election rival inappropriate, while using the controversy to accuse Eisenkot of ignoring similar insults aimed at Likud supporters.
UNIFIL's mandate expires at the end of 2026, and in the village of Ibl al-Saqi, where the force has been the single biggest employer for decades, shop and workshop owners say its exit will hollow out the local economy.
In a sworn High Court affidavit, a former campaign tech chief says Likud's new app could let observers use their own phones to secretly transmit voter data in real time using AI, despite a court ban on exactly that.
First-time voters, demolition orders, and a spike in violent crime are driving new mobilization among Arab Israelis, who make up 21 percent of the population and have long argued their turnout is the surest check on the far right.
Nearly 1,800 people were arrested after a night of rioting that destroyed a historic town hall and left a Paris synagogue vandalized, as the country assessed hundreds of millions of euros in damage.
Regional diplomats don't expect a wholesale shift on Iran or Palestinian statehood no matter who wins on October 27, but say smaller policy changes on Gaza rehabilitation and settler violence could still matter a great deal.
Sarah Helm's social-media post was reviewed after the Campaign Against Antisemitism called for an investigation, but the Metropolitan Police concluded it did not meet the threshold for criminal action.
The military says the men killed over three days of strikes were working to rebuild Hamas's capabilities in what it calls a systematic violation of the ceasefire.
Despite video footage and an IDF condemnation of the incident, the prime minister suggested the attack on a diplomatic convoy near Taybeh could be part of a coordinated smear campaign against Israel.
A march against rising living costs that drew Palestinian flags and keffiyehs spiraled into looting and arson in central Milan, part of a wider wave of European unrest over the same weekend.
President Joseph Aoun told France's foreign minister Lebanon would prefer to simply extend UNIFIL's mandate, but is open to alternative arrangements to avoid a security vacuum once the peacekeeping force leaves.
The opposition leaders say they'd use a new government's first Knesset session to launch an October 7 inquiry and push a term-limit law and a 'defendants' law' aimed squarely at Netanyahu.
A day after undergoing hand surgery, Heidi Levine rejected the prime minister's suggestion that settlers helped her up after the assault, saying it was Palestinian colleagues who saved her life.
Beyond the attack on the diplomatic convoy, settlers fired on Palestinian olive harvesters in Deir Jarir and stabbed roughly 20 sheep to death in a separate raid, as the European Council warned against Israel's settlement expansion plans.
Orthodox Jewish Americans largely still back Netanyahu, while younger and more liberal Jews increasingly say his policies have hurt Israel's standing and fueled the antisemitism rising in their own communities.
The national security minister's walkabout through Ramle's market split onlookers between selfie-seeking supporters and critics who say his presence in a mixed city is itself a provocation.
Over 700 activists from the Nachala movement built a symbolic outpost just outside Gaza, pressing the government to turn it into the first permanent Israeli settlement inside the territory.
Rabbi Dov Lior's ruling, issued during the West Bank's tense olive harvest season, drew sharp pushback from a moderate Orthodox group that called taking the olives theft, plain and simple.
Yinon Magal's comment about the Moroccan-heritage opposition leader on Channel 14's Patriots program drew immediate comparisons to a notorious 1981 slur against Sephardic voters.
Meeting on the sidelines of a summit in Baku, Wang Yi called the Palestinian question the greatest historical injustice of the century, while Herzog used his own address to push for deeper ties with Asia.
Nearly 87 percent of eligible envoys, diplomats and their families cast ballots across 101 polling stations worldwide, a sharp jump from 2022, as Israel remains one of the few democracies that bars remote voting for ordinary citizens abroad.
Liberman's refusal to sit with Arab or ultra-Orthodox parties breaks from his own record in the 2021 Bennett-Lapid government, a stance that looks less like fixed ideology than a bet on his own political future.
The Yisrael Beytenu leader says the Yashar frontrunner's real goal is overtaking Likud to negotiate from strength, not building the biggest opposition bloc. Eisenkot calls it spin.
Sgt. Gur Kehati died trying to save a 71-year-old researcher ambushed by Hezbollah operatives in 2024. Nearly two years later, his family says the military's response has left them unable to find peace at home.
Witnesses described a coordinated assault near Abu Falah that also saw vehicles torched near Turmus Ayya and an elderly Palestinian injured near Birzeit, as Netanyahu's office offered a starkly different account of who confronted whom.
Eliakim Stark made the comparison while discussing draft-related travel restrictions on Haredi men. Politicians across the spectrum, including fellow coalition leaders, condemned the remark.
Yoav Horowitz, who ran Netanyahu's office from 2016 to 2019 and later helped found Gadi Eisenkot's party, said on air that Netanyahu should be assumed to be a Qatari agent. Likud calls it incitement.
Marking two years since the Hamas leader's death, the military published a letter it says was recovered from his son in 2024, which it presented as evidence of how the group's ideology was passed on to its leader's own children.
Exchange research covering ten elections since 2003 found Israeli stocks historically fall harder ahead of inconclusive votes than ones that produce a stable government, and this October looks like the former.
COGAT says Palestinian importers walked off the job after Hamas demanded roughly 10,000 shekels per truck entering the Strip, a version of events Gaza's truckers union flatly rejects.
A survey published via The Times of Israel's sister site Zman Yisrael put the anti-Netanyahu bloc at 54 seats and the pro-Netanyahu bloc at 49, with Yashar six seats ahead of Likud and neither camp near the 61-seat threshold.
Two months after a US company won the tender to build an outpost for 150 international troops, Israel has still not let contractors or trucks into Gaza, with the project's backers expecting a green light only after the election.
The ruling party and Religious Zionism cite unsubstantiated fraud concerns for the deployment, which the Joint List calls a racist campaign and which election officials say addresses a problem that barely exists.
With tech workers supplying over a third of Israel's tax income and AI adoption surging past the European average, officials are weighing a broader tax package rather than a dedicated AI levy.
Gali Baharav-Miara told the court the law should not take effect while petitions against it are still pending, arguing it strips away Israel's main framework for protecting journalistic independence.
A Channel 12 investigation found that most of the NIS 4.8 million raised by a nonprofit founded by Shas candidate Dror Amos for October 7 bereaved families instead went toward yeshiva student stipends.
With roughly two-thirds of Supreme Court seats set to turn over during the next government's term, a renewed push to limit the court's powers could hand whoever wins the election outsized influence over the judiciary.
With 38 parties registered for the October 27 vote and polls putting his new Yashar party on track to be the Knesset's largest, Eisenkot is pitching himself as a right-wing alternative free of the current coalition's baggage.
Dr. Nechumi Yaffe, a Haredi political psychology researcher who has advised the National Security Council on ultra-Orthodox poverty, joined the newly formed Charedi Public party's slate just before the filing deadline.
Founding members Meir Cohen and Mickey Levy were among those declining to run again, as weak polling numbers fueled talk that Bennett should abandon the joint run and merge with Eisenkot's rising Yashar party instead.
Governor Amir Yaron's 25-basis-point cut brought rates to 3.25 percent, the lowest since the pandemic era, as the bank tries to balance a cooling inflation picture against exporters squeezed by a strengthening shekel.
Fifty-six elderly petitioners argue the Knesset's decision not to renew a pandemic-era requirement for polling stations inside care facilities effectively disenfranchises tens of thousands of residents.
Simcha Rothman, the architect of the government's judicial overhaul push, says he's open to creating a new top court the government could staff through its own appointments, stripping the existing Supreme Court of judicial review.
The lawmaker, isolated within Likud over his opposition to shielding yeshiva students from the draft, says voting Likud today effectively means voting for the ultra-Orthodox leaders who now set the government's priorities.
Orit Strock secured the number-two slot on the party's Knesset list, while Smotrich is expected to use one of his reserved picks on the father of a former hostage who co-founded a group opposing ceasefire deals with Hamas.
Lawmakers voted 62-0 to dissolve parliament ahead of the October 27 election, capping a session that Speaker Amir Ohana called the most challenging in Israeli history, with a late burst of controversial legislation passed hours before the vote.
A Channel 13 survey put Eisenkot's Yashar party at 21 seats, just behind Likud, with the combined opposition bloc crossing the threshold needed to form a government without Netanyahu's coalition.
The 65-51 vote lets ministers override the attorney general's binding legal opinions and hands the government direct control over the AG's appointment, replacing the independent selection committee currently in place.
The agency kept Israel's Baa1 rating intact but flagged the push to curb the attorney general's powers as exactly the kind of institutional erosion that could eventually trigger a downgrade.
The 58-54 vote temporarily bars prosecution of ultra-Orthodox men who have evaded military service, prompting the IDF chief of staff to call it 'inconceivable' and a deputy foreign minister to resign in protest.
Smotrich's package funnels most of its funding toward growth-stage startups through the Israel Innovation Authority, though industry leaders say companies need immediate cash-flow relief, not growth incentives.
Over a 40-day campaign that saw more than 1,000 Israeli strike waves and roughly 650 Iranian ballistic missiles fired back, defense and compensation costs together reshaped a large slice of the 2026 state budget.
