With 75,000 killed, Gaza is conspicuously absent from the Israeli elections
The leading candidates have not presented a plan for the future of the Strip, which has been devastated by three years of bombing, and have focused on the victims of Hamas
Israeli polling stations are less than six miles from the Adnan family’s tent, in Al Mawasi in the southern Gaza Strip, where tens of thousands of displaced people live. But the fate of this family and of the two million Palestinians who for three years have been decimated by bombs, forced from their homes and plunged into a futureless misery are entirely absent from the speeches of the candidates in Tuesday’s Israeli legislative election.
“We feel that, whoever wins, Israeli policy toward Gaza will remain the same: blockade, destruction, and denial of our fundamental rights,” says Kholoud Adnan, 23, part of a generation of Gazans who have never voted because there have been no Palestinian general elections since 2006.
The Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023, the more than 250 hostages held in the Strip and Israel’s relentless offensive against Gaza — which has left nearly 75,000 people dead and the territory’s infrastructure virtually destroyed — have defined the legislature and the daily lives of Israelis. Yet the campaign has focused only on Israeli victims of Hamas and, above all, alleged security failures three years ago that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has resisted having investigated.
The silence about Gaza in speeches by the Israeli right, but also in the opposition to Netanyahu, “says a lot about the framework in which these elections are being held,” says Yair Dvir, a spokesman for the Israeli NGO B’Tselem. “No one talks about Israel’s responsibility or its crimes. There is a kind of consensus, a tacit agreement, about the genocide our army is committing.”
Neither Netanyahu nor his main rival, Gadi Einsenkot — who, according to the polls, is set to receive the most votes this Tuesday — seems to have a plan for Gaza, at least publicly. Their speeches focus on defeating Hamas — a key issue in Israeli society, which remains traumatized by the 2023 attacks — and on supporting Donald Trump’s peace plan, which is completely stalled.
It is a mystery how Netanyahu has politically survived the social hecatomb caused by the 2023 attacks and how he remains a popular candidate. But his refusal to create an independent commission to investigate the alleged security errors on the day of the attacks, rumors that he received intelligence about Hamas’s plans and did nothing, and accusations that he put his personal interests ahead of the release of the hostages could cost him this Tuesday. Polls indicate it will be very difficult for him to reach the 61 seats he needs to gain a majority and stay in office. His party, Likud, is projected to win about 21 seats, versus the 32 it took in 2022.
Opposing him, Eisenkot, a former IDF chief of staff whose son died in the military offensive in Gaza, has promised that if elected prime minister he would achieve “the destruction of Hamas’s armed wing” in a year and a half. “Either through an operation based on President Trump’s plan or through a military operation,” he said.
“Eisenkot believes that Netanyahu did not finish the mission Israel had in Gaza, despite having destroyed the Strip and virtually displaced its entire population,” says Raji Sourani, a Gazan and director of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR). “So he will continue with ethnic cleansing not only in Gaza, but in the West Bank and Jerusalem, as most Israelis want.”
To the right of the right, rhetoric about Gaza is even more radical. Hardline National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has advocated, for example, occupying the entire Strip — which the Israeli military already controls roughly 60% of, according to the UN — building settlements, and transferring the entire population. “There are people there who are not worthy of life. They shouldn’t live. They’re not even people,” he said recently. His party, Jewish Power, is forecast win about eight of the 120 seats in the Knesset this Tuesday.
“I think these statements show us the extent to which Palestinians have been dehumanized in our country, and that we’ve come to accept it as normal that Israel controls them and continues to do so. We’re not interested in their suffering,” Dvir laments.
Only the Joint List, one of the two Arab options representing Palestinians with Israeli citizenship — who make up around 20% of the total population — published during its campaign a video showing the devastation in Gaza. It accused the other parties of “wanting more destruction.” Analysts say Israelis do not know and do not want to know what is happening in Gaza. “When the film NAZA was released, for example, we saw the whole country, even people on the left, attack the directors for showing that reality,” recalls the B’Tselem spokesman.
The last Israeli hostages held by Hamas returned home in October 2025. With them, Gaza disappeared from the agenda and the streets, where demonstrations calling for a real ceasefire dwindled to a handful of die-hard activists. Another topic barely discussed in Israel is military deaths or the trauma suffered by some soldiers who served in the Strip. According to Israeli military figures, about 470 soldiers have died in ground operations in Gaza.
The future and reconstruction of the Palestinian territory are also not on the table, even though they are included in Trump’s plan — and even less so during the campaign. The U.S.-brokered ceasefire as part of the plan for Gaza officially took effect just over a year ago, but “in reality it never began,” Sourani says. Since October 2025, some 1,500 Gazans have died from Israeli fire. In addition, there is no running water or electricity, and hospitals are operating at reduced capacity and cannot properly treat patients due to lack of supplies and space. Schools are destroyed, there is no land to cultivate, and 90% of the population has no income. Rubble has not been cleared and not a single sack of cement has entered the Strip to start rebuilding, Sourani says.
“But after three years of a genocide broadcast live amid the international community’s silence, why would Israel change its behavior? Palestinian blood is too cheap,” he adds.
For Meir Margalit, an analyst and former leader of the pacifist Meretz party, Israeli politicians do not speak about Gaza because they do not know how to address the issue and “fear it could cost them seats” if they wade into that quagmire. “Especially if it is true, as some experts say, that Hamas has managed to rearm and has as many fighters now as on October 6, 2023. People ask: then, was it all for nothing?”
Given this bleak panorama, are Eisenkot and his anti-Netanyahu bloc a real alternative? “It is true that almost all oppose a Palestinian state and also oppose ending the settlements,” Dvir of B’Tselem notes. “They are certainly not a real change, but we are at a point where they are a Plan B against a government willing to continue with genocide and ethnic cleansing even if the whole world is against them.”
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