Gadi Eisenkot, former IDF chief of staff and leader of the Yashar party. (Image: Yahav Studio / Wikimedia Commons — CC BY-SA 3.0)
Israel's main opposition challenger has put Gaza at the center of the election campaign, promising voters he will finish what three years of war have not.
Gadi Eisenkot, the 66-year-old former chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces and leader of the center-right Yashar party, told a press conference Thursday near the Gaza border that if he wins the Oct. 27 election, Hamas will be gone from power in Gaza within a year and a half.
"From the moment I enter the Prime Minister's Office, within 18 months Hamas will no longer rule the Gaza Strip," Eisenkot said, speaking at the Black Arrow memorial site near Kibbutz Mefalsim, within sight of the war-ravaged territory.
Eisenkot laid out two routes to that goal. The first is implementing U.S. President Donald Trump's ceasefire framework for Gaza, which calls for the gradual disarmament of Hamas and a transfer of power — a plan he noted the Netanyahu government has already accepted. The second, if diplomacy fails, is what he called "creative operations" by Israel's military to destroy Hamas's armed wing.
The pledge is a direct attack on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's wartime record. Eisenkot accused the premier of "strategic failure" in Gaza, arguing that three years after the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks, "Hamas is still the sovereign — armed, arming itself, and militarily active." He charged that no Israeli government had ever received so much public and international backing while achieving so little of what it set out to do.
Eisenkot also renewed a long-standing opposition demand: a state commission of inquiry to investigate the security failures that allowed the Oct. 7 attacks, in which more than 1,200 people were killed in southern Israel. The government has so far resisted creating one. "There is a way to prevent the next disaster," he said.
Netanyahu's Likud party fired back, questioning whether Eisenkot could act against Hamas while depending on Arab lawmakers such as Mansour Abbas and Ahmad Tibi for a governing coalition. Netanyahu himself has rejected claims of personal responsibility for the Oct. 7 lapses, insisting security officials never woke him on the morning of the assault.
The Oct. 27 vote will be Israel's first election since the Hamas attacks, and the polls suggest a knife-edge result: neither Netanyahu's bloc nor Eisenkot's is currently projected to win the 61 seats needed to control the 120-seat Knesset. With Gaza's future unresolved — Israel's offensive has killed more than 74,300 people in the territory, according to its Hamas-run health ministry — Eisenkot is betting that a hard deadline on Hamas will convince voters he can succeed where the incumbent has not.