KFAR AZA, Israel — Israeli American Keith Siegel doesn’t do politics, he said. Even, and especially, after he was kidnapped by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, and held hostage in Gaza for 484 days.

But when asked about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s closing argument going into Tuesday’s voting that only he can keep Israel safe, Siegel simply said, “I don’t agree.”

On the eve of the first election since then, Siegel, now 67, made a rare visit to his home in Kfar Aza, a kibbutz a mile from the Gaza border where 80 people were murdered and 19 were taken captive by Hamas on Oct. 7.

As automatic gunfire and mortar rounds went off in the distance near the Palestinian territory, Siegel said he wanted the devastation and trauma to end.

“I hate war and I hate killing and I hate death, and unnecessary death, from my point of view,” he said. “I don’t only think about us Israelis, I also think about children in Gaza that were born into this reality they didn’t choose.”

The gruesome Oct. 7 terrorist attacks by Hamas fundamentally reshaped Israeli politics — and created a formidable challenger to Netanyahu: Gadi Eisenkot, his former Israeli Defense Forces chief of staff turned rival who could be the one to oust the longtime prime minister from power.

In December 2023, two months into the war against Hamas, Eisenkot’s 25-year-old son, Gal, was killed while fighting in Gaza. Six months later, Eisenkot resigned from Netanyahu’s emergency war Cabinet, citing a lack of strategy to end the conflict.

Eisenkot’s personal loss motivated him to run against his former boss, his grief resonating with Israelis still reeling from that day and the ensuing war fronts. He has promised an independent inquiry into the failures surrounding the Oct. 7 attacks.

Siegel said he is not focused on blame, but he — like many Israelis — wants answers as to what went wrong leading up to and in the aftermath of the attacks.

“This enormous failure, people that were in charge need to be held accountable or need to be responsible for what happened, primarily in order to do everything possible that something like that won’t happen again,” Siegel said.

A recent poll from Israel’s Channel 12 found responsibility for Oct. 7 was likely to influence the decisions of 70% of voters, with 83% saying Netanyahu bears at least some degree of responsibility and only 8% saying he doesn’t at all.

Even after the results of the election come in, it may take weeks for a new prime minister to be chosen, which likely will require multiple political parties to come together in a coalition.

On Saturday night, tens of thousands of protesters gathered in Tel Aviv’s Hostages Square for an anti-Netanyahu demonstration, bringing together voters across the opposition “change” bloc.

First-time voter Tal Schneider said the attack by Hamas made him realize having a healthy government is “life or death.”

”It’s dangerous,” said Schneider, 18. “I’m going to serve in the army, and if I will be in a never-ending war, I don’t want to serve. But I want to serve, I want to protect my people, but this government is so corrupt that it will be impossible.”

Maya Katorza first became politically active in early 2023, protesting Netanyahu’s push to overhaul Israel’s judicial system. But Oct. 7 opened her eyes.

“It was really shocking,” she said. “Made it much more like our life depends on it.”

“There is a power here I personally didn’t feel before,” said Katorza, wearing a shirt featuring the Hebrew lyric, “I have no other country,” which she got from a restaurant helping Israelis evacuated from kibbutzes attacked on Oct. 7.

Throughout Israel, communities came together to fill the gaps left by the Netanyahu government in the aftermath of the attacks, from transportation to food supply to counseling.

Tami Lubitsch, a clinical psychologist and dual U.S.-Israeli citizen, is offering volunteer mental health services from Alaska to Israelis impacted by Oct. 7.

“The country is falling apart,” Lubitsch said. “It’s just a government that can’t do anything right, and that’s kind of the nature of it. When you devote yourself to the mentality of war and hatred, it’s gonna affect everything. They’re building a culture of hate, and if that would continue, the very moral foundation of Israel would be gone.”

Still, not everyone places the blame on Netanyahu.

Ely Ram, who was serving in the IDF on Oct. 7 and has spent time in Gaza, blames the “bad people” of Hamas and said without Netanyahu, Israelis would not be allowed to protect their country.

“I’m afraid,” Ram, 24, said at a Tel Aviv bar a few blocks away from the massive anti-Netanyahu rally. “Because the other side doesn’t want Israel’s security.”

The wars fought on multiple fronts by Israel since Oct. 7 — in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran — have put a strain on the Israeli military, making the debate over requiring military service for the country’s roughly 80,000 ultra-Orthodox men a defining issue in this election.

According to a September poll by the Israel Democracy Institute, 72% of Israelis want the ultra-Orthodox Haredim, who avoid military service with religious study of the Torah, to be drafted.

“It’s the fact that you can go into Gaza as a combat soldier not knowing if you’ll come back alive or how long we’ll be staying there because the prime minister doesn’t allow recruiting religious people, so the amount of soldiers are fewer and fewer and fewer,” said first-time voter Tal Pinkas, 18, who is supporting retired Gen. Yair Golan and The Democrats.

Reuven Hazan, a political scientist at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, thinks Netanyahu is making a “catastrophic mistake” by hoping the people of Israel will have short memories.

“We’ve had in these four years an endless amount of events that have shaken Israeli society to the core,” he said, citing judicial overhaul protests, Oct. 7, the war in Gaza and the Iran war. ”Israeli society is spent. It’s tired. It’s not post-trauma. It’s going through trauma still.”

These events, Hazan said, have moved Israelis in two directions: to the political right and becoming more religious. While both shifts should be beneficial to Netanyahu, if he loses power, a public outcry for more accountability around the Oct. 7 attacks would have played a significant role.

Katorza, who supports Golan and The Democrats, is worried about Israel’s reputation on the world stage.

“I think about all foreign affairs of Israel going down the drain with the politics of this government,” she said. “There was never a time that Israel was so unliked and so unsupported by both sides of the political map in the United States, the Republicans and the Democrats.”

A test for Netanyahu

The Netanyahu government’s response to Oct. 7 has prompted international criticism and condemnation. On Monday, a United Nations report concluded that Israel has committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in the West Bank and is continuing to commit genocide in Gaza, even amid a so-called ceasefire. The Israeli government rejected the U.N. report, calling it a “misinformation campaign to demonize the State of Israel and portray its very existence as criminal.”

More than 74,000 Palestinians have been killed during the Gaza war, according to estimates from the Hamas-run health ministry, which U.N. agencies consider to be accurate. UNRWA estimates that about 82% of structures in Gaza have been damaged and about two-thirds of those have been destroyed.

But if you ask Israelis across the political spectrum, many reject claims of genocide in Gaza, arguing Israel has no other choice and works to mitigate civilian casualties.

Shay Tiram, who is voting for Bezalel Smotrich’s far-right Religious Zionist Party, said starting on Oct. 8, Netanyahu did “a very good job” and called accusations of genocide a “hoax” and “brainwash.”

“We know that we are a nation of peace, and we didn’t choose this war,” said Tiram, 35. “But you attack us, we have to protect ourselves … We need to displace them.”

A choice for Israelis

In the closing days of the election, many voters saw the race as a choice between the two front-runners for prime minister, Netanyahu and Eisenkot.

While both Netanyahu and Eisenkot agree on certain policy issues, including opposition to a two-state solution, there is daylight between them in a few key areas: the West Bank, President Donald Trump’s Gaza peace plan and military service for Israel’s ultra-Orthodox Jews.

“There will be a change of policy, but it doesn’t usually meet the standards of what outsiders see as a change of policy,” said Dahlia Scheindlin, an Israeli pollster and political analyst.

“Netanyahu and his coalition want to annex Gaza, they want to rebuild settlements, and they want Palestinians to leave,” she said. “Eisenkot is not going into it with quite the same convictions.”

Supporters of Eisenkot believe he could provide a fresh slate as a less polarizing personality, even with similar hawkish politics to Netanyahu.

In his closing argument at a rally in Tel Aviv on Sunday, Eisenkot vowed to deliver on his campaign promises on Oct. 7 accountability, ultra-Orthodox military participation and ending Hamas rule of Gaza within 18 months.

“Anyone who believes that ‘our Israel’ can survive another four years like this is operating under a dangerous delusion,” he told his supporters. “Draft evasion, failure, negligence, and lies—this is the path of the ‘government of draft-dodgers.’ If we continue down this road, Israel will very soon cease to be the country we know. This is a final wake-up call.”

Netanyahu, for his part, has contrasted Eisenkot’s lack of diplomatic experience with his own long-standing relationships with world leaders.

Netanyahu has repeatedly highlighted his endorsement from Trump, emphasizing the need to finish the war with Iran, which he has been characterizing in increasingly apocalyptic terms, including with an artificial intelligence-generated photo of a nuclear bomb cloud over Tel Aviv.

Netanyahu has also continued to try to depict any increase in the political power of Arab Israelis as a threat to Israel’s identity.

On social media, Netanyahu described an opposition government that could include Mansour Abbas, leader of the Arab Ra’am party, as one that “robs Israel of its Jewish identity and concedes and bows to our enemies or a strong right-wing government that works to protect the state of Israel, that will finish the job and remove the Iranian threat once and for all.”

With Arab Israelis voting at a record high rate, they could become critical in the coalition building process if neither Netanyahu or Eisenkot reach the needed 61-seat Knesset majority outright, which is unlikely based on polling.

Arab leaders have historically been excluded from the Israeli government — but some voters say that should change.

Leon Tsi — whose childhood friend was brutally murdered by Hamas at the Nova Festival massacre on Oct. 7 — said Abbas should have a seat at the table should Tsi’s preferred candidate, Eisenkot, win.

Israeli politicians often tout Israel as a rare example of a democracy in the Middle East, Tsi, 35, said, “so act like one.”

“There are different kinds of Judaism, different kinds of Muslim, different kinds of groups,” he added. “And we have to recognize it.”

Josh Einiger in Kfar Aza contributed reporting.

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