Israel’s economic future is on the ballot after Netanyahu offers a grim forecast.

Turnout appeared to be particularly high among Arab citizens, who make up about a fifth of Israel’s population. By late afternoon, hours before the polls were set to close, turnout in some Arab-majority towns had exceeded the totals from the last election, in 2022.

Responding to the high turnout in those towns, Mr. Netanyahu accused Arab citizens of “trying to steal the elections,” repeatedly using brazen and overtly racial appeals to push his right-wing base to vote. An attempt by his Likud party on Tuesday to have voting hours extended was rejected by the Central Election Committee.

The election is Israel’s first since the Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, which was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust and ignited three years of war that left Gaza largely in ruins and nearly all its population displaced.

Voters have a choice between two blocs offering starkly different visions. Mr. Netanyahu, the leader of the most far-right government in Israeli history, built a coalition of nationalists and ultra-Orthodox Jews, which faces an ideologically diverse group of Jewish opposition parties loosely led by Gadi Eisenkot, a former military chief of staff whose son was killed in the Gaza war. Parties representing Arab citizens of Israel also staunchly oppose Mr. Netanyahu’s government.

Both sides are framing the election as a make-or-break moment for the country. Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition offers the promise of a more religious Israel with an ever-tighter grip over the West Bank and Gaza. His opponents are casting the vote as the last chance to preserve democracy and pull Israel back from the brink of becoming a pariah state under international sanctions.

Voting will close at 10 p.m. (4 p.m. Eastern time), but there is unlikely to be an immediate determination of who will be the next prime minister. Opinion polls suggest that Mr. Netanyahu’s allies and rivals are roughly tied, and assembling a governing coalition in Israel’s parliamentary system could take weeks or months.

Opposition leaders led by Mr. Eisenkot have called for a reckoning over what they call Mr. Netanyahu’s failure to prevent the catastrophic Oct. 7 attacks. They also have pledged to repair Israel’s shattered image abroad, including by cracking down on Israeli extremist violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

Mr. Netanyahu has resisted the establishment of an independent commission to investigate the Oct. 7 attacks. He has vowed to move ahead with overhauling Israel’s judicial system, a move that critics say could undermine the country’s liberal democracy. And his allies say they hope to permanently entrench Israeli rule in the West Bank and Gaza despite international condemnation.

The 77-year-old leader has dominated Israeli politics for decades. In recent days, he repeatedly suggested that the country could face annihilation without him in charge.

Here’s what else to watch:

• Key issues: In a tumultuous campaign, several issues divided Israeli voters. Read more ›

• West Bank and Gaza: As Israelis headed to the polls, Palestinians in the West Bank were under an Israeli military lockdown. Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza cannot vote in Israeli elections, but they may have much to lose if Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition stays in power. Read more ›

• Netanyahu sows doubt: Mr. Netanyahu used racially charged language to cast suspicion over high turnout among Arab citizens and to encourage his base to go to the polls. Election officials said Tuesday that there had been no indication of widespread irregularities.

• Trump weighs in: President Trump has endorsed Mr. Netanyahu, praising him as an important partner in the war against Iran and saying anyone else would be the “wrong leader” for Israel. Analysts were skeptical that the U.S. president’s intervention would sway many voters.

“It’s over,” he said. “It’s only a matter of time.”

The comments were a reflection of Israel’s deepening global isolation, with even once-staunch allies imposing or threatening economic sanctions and embargoes after years of war in Gaza and rampant violence by Jewish settlers against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

With settlers advancing into areas that were previously off limits, Britain last month decried what it called “ethnic cleansing” and announced trade sanctions on settlements that it said would also apply to entities that financed their construction. Though Israel’s banking system has not been directly targeted by sanctions, a dozen countries, including Canada, France and Spain, have said they support restrictions on trade with settlements, raising the prospect of further penalties that could affect Israeli financial institutions.

Opponents of Mr. Netanyahu’s government decried his pronouncements, which also drew a rebuke from the generally reserved central bank.

“Crypto currencies cannot serve as a route to bypass sanctions against Israel,” the Bank of Israel said in a statement. The bank added that the government would do better “to focus on preventing sanctions” and preserving Israel’s economic ties with its main trading partners.

Commentators said that Mr. Netanyahu’s outlook sounded apocalyptic, and some said it was part of a scare campaign to improve his election prospects.

Last year, amid growing global condemnation of the Israeli military’s conduct of the war against Hamas in Gaza, where it has been accused of war crimes, and the imposition of some arms embargoes, he warned that Israel would have to become a more self-sufficient “super-Sparta.” That reference to the ancient, insular Greek city-state that practiced militaristic self-reliance was, to critics, a frightening scenario for a small country whose economy is largely driven by a tech sector that is reliant on foreign investment.

Gadi Eisenkot, Mr. Netanyahu’s main rival in Tuesday’s election, said in a social media post that the prime minister’s “Bibi-coin vision,” a nod to cryptocurrency, would “dismantle the Israeli economy for generations.”

“No internet purchases, no high-tech investments, no national security,” he added.

Yair Lapid, the opposition leader who has served as prime minister and finance minister, wrote on social media that a vote for Mr. Netanyahu was a vote for “a ruined economy, sanctions that will lead to insane price hikes, and no military alliance with the United States.”

And a former governor of the Bank of Israel, Jacob Frenkel, told Israel’s Channel 12 on Sunday that moving away from the international financial system would turn Israel into “a leper.”

Mr. Netanyahu later walked back his remarks slightly, saying that he had heard the criticism and that cryptocurrency was only one option to deal with potential financial sanctions.

In a somewhat jarring contrast, Mr. Netanyahu’s campaign has argued that Israel’s economy overall is healthy despite years of war, helped by record export revenues, relatively low inflation and unemployment, and a strong shekel.

But many Israelis are not feeling it. The State Comptroller, a government watchdog, warned last year that the cost of living was “skyrocketing” in part because of structural challenges in Israel’s consumer market and low competition levels.

While foreign affairs and national security have dominated the political conversation ahead of the election, a recent survey by the Israel Democracy Institute, a nonpartisan research group, found that the economy was the top issue for many voters heading into Tuesday.

“The Israeli government has enormous influence over our lives,” said Montaser Amro, 32, a supermarket owner in Majd, a village near the southern city of Hebron. “It chooses when roadblocks open and close, it controls the borders, and it decides on how much of our economy functions.”

He added, “Why can’t we vote when settlers living hundreds of meters away can?”

Israel captured the West Bank in 1967 and reached an agreement with the Palestine Liberation Organization to establish the Palestinian Authority in the 1990s. The Palestinian Authority administers parts of the West Bank and has not held parliamentary or presidential elections for roughly 20 years.

Many Palestinians have long hoped the Palestinian Authority would transform into an independent Palestinian state. In recent years, those hopes have dwindled. The Israeli government promotes the expansion of settlements in the West Bank that are widely considered illegal under international law and rejects Palestinian self-determination there and in Gaza. Palestinian officials have also failed to unify their ranks and renew their leadership.

Alaa al-Khabass, 40, a resident of Hebron, said it was unjust that Palestinians could not cast ballots.

“Israel controls just about everything related to us, and I don’t see that changing any time soon,” he said. “We should be able to vote, but we live in painful reality where we lack rights and sovereignty.”

Turnout

This is considered one of the most consequential elections in Israel’s history, and voters turned out in record numbers.

Recent polls had suggested that voter turnout could be at least as high or higher than in the last general election, in 2022. That year, slightly more than 70 percent of eligible voters — nearly 4.8 million out of nearly 6.8 million people — participated. That election followed four other votes in quick succession from 2019 to 2021 in which turnout hovered near 70 percent.

This year, there are 7.3 million eligible voters, about 540,000 more than in 2022.

The 3.25 percent threshold

Parties must clear a threshold of 3.25 percent of the total vote in order to get a seat in the Knesset, or Parliament.

But no party is expected to gain a majority of 61 parliamentary seats, according to the polls. That means there will likely be lots of post-election negotiations among those parties who pass the threshold.

Parties or lists that do not reach the threshold lose those ballots. As a result, parties and candidates lobby voters not to waste their votes on a list that seems unlikely to meet this criterion.

At least one party has also faced repeated attacks from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party and the far-right Religious Zionism party led by Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister.

The targeted party, People of Israel, is led by Ofer Winter, a former Israeli brigadier general with hawkish views on national security. Some polls show that much of Mr. Winter’s support comes from voters who would normally choose Likud. Mr. Winter has faced claims that a vote for his party will be wasted or may end up going to the leading challengers.

While Mr. Winter initially said that he would support Mr. Netanyahu, he has refused any deals to withdraw from the race and has since signaled the pledge may have been premature.

Disinformation and challenges

Israeli election officials have said there is no evidence of threats to the integrity of this election in terms of widespread fraud or vote counting irregularities. But experts are concerned about disinformation campaigns undermining the vote or thwarting turnout.

Critics fear that some moves by the governing right-wing coalition may cast doubt on the outcome even before the vote happens or may thwart turnout among some voters.

Absentee voting is mostly prohibited in Israel. But by some estimates, tens of thousands of Israelis living abroad were expected to fly in to vote, a factor that could potentially swing the outcome.

Likud had filed a lawsuit challenging an initiative to fly in Israeli voters from abroad — a move widely perceived as an effort to limit opposition voters from showing up. The party had said the nonpartisan program provided benefits that could sway voters in violation of Israeli law. But it withdrew the suit this month after the initiative’s organizers agreed to limit flights and not to defray travelers’ costs.

Likud and other right-wing parties also filed motions to limit participation of several Arab candidates in the election.

The Central Elections Committee can vote to bar candidates or lists on certain grounds, such as expressing support for armed conflict against Israel. But the nation’s Supreme Court gets the final say. This month, it rejected a challenge to the Joint List, a merger of three majority-Arab parties, and to Raam, a historically Islamist party led by Mansour Abbas, who is running with Yoav Segalovitz, a former deputy minister of national security who was previously in the centrist Zionist party There Is a Future.

Voter suppression

In 2022, turnout in five of the largest Arab localities in Israel was lower, sometimes significantly, than the national figures. This year, officials in Arab communities worked to get voters to the polls in larger numbers and prepared for potential resistance.

Likud and the Religious Zionism party announced plans this month to deploy thousands of religious Jewish “observers” to “prevent fraud in voting and vote-counting in Arab communities.”

Critics contend that the presence of such observers, likely from far-right Zionist parties, was intended to intimidate Arab citizens of Israel, who make up 20 percent of the population and could be critical to the election’s outcome.

“The main issue we want to avoid is ‘fake news,’” said Abed Shahada, who leads voter turnout efforts for an organization representing mayors and other officials in Arab localities.

One major issue expected to drive voters is high crime in Arab communities. But if there are reports of or disinformation about criminal or violent episodes on Election Day that could keep people from the polls, Mr. Shahada said, teams are preparing by setting up a system to share verified information.

Mr. Netanyahu has a long track record of appealing to his supporters by invoking the specter of the Arab vote. Arab citizens represent about 20 percent of Israel’s population, but have long complained that they are treated as second-class citizens and subject to discrimination.

In 2015, Mr. Netanyahu called on right-wing Israelis to vote because “Arabs were heading in droves to the polls.” His comments were widely condemned at home and abroad, including by the Obama administration. Mr. Netanyahu was accused of race-baiting and was forced to issue an apology for the remark.

On Tuesday, as initial data showed high turnout in Arab cities and towns, Mr. Netanyahu again used almost the same language to vilify Arab voters in several different statements over the course of the day.

“They say their voters are heading to the polls in droves. You too must head to the polls in droves,” Mr. Netanyahu said in a video statement, addressing right-wing voters.

Yousef Jabareen, who leads the Joint List alliance of Arab parties, accused Mr. Netanyahu of “inciting against Arab citizens and undermining the legitimacy of our vote.”

“I’m telling you: the Arab community knows how to punish you,” Mr. Jabareen said. “Today we’re sending you and your bloodstained government packing.”

Arab citizens have tended to vote at lower rates than their Jewish counterparts. But in the run-up to this election, surveys suggested that they would turn out in higher numbers in an effort to vote out Mr. Netanyahu and his far-right allies. In Rahat, a large Bedouin town in southern Israel, turnout just before 5 p.m. was already at 60 percent — matching the town’s final turnout in the previous election.

Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud party and some hard-right ministers in his government have also deployed incendiary messaging to appeal to supporters to vote.

The Likud party released images suggesting that there had been higher turnout in the Arab city of Rahat than Bat Yam, a Likud stronghold, which it called “a state of emergency.”

Another poster showed women in Muslim religious veils with the caption: “Right-wing voters, don’t stay home.”

Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right national security minister, joined in the prime minister in trying to stoke fears over high Arab turnout. In a video filmed near the entrance of the Arab town of Kufr Qassim in central Israel, he said that Arab voters were heading to the polls “at hitherto never-before-seen rates,” threatening Israel’s Jewish character.

The prime minister also pointed to the arrests of three people suspected of planning to bribe voters for Raam, an Arab Israeli party, on Tuesday. Dean Livne, the acting director of Israel’s central elections committee, told reporters that there were no reports of widespread irregularities.

Lia Lapidot and Johnatan Reiss contributed reporting.

About 1,200 civilians and soldiers were killed that day, according to the Israeli authorities, and roughly 250 were taken hostage to Gaza. Many of the family members of hostages held by Hamas rose to prominence as they campaigned for their loved ones in television interviews and at nationwide protests.

Most of them called for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to take responsibility for the government’s failures of Oct. 7 and to prioritize negotiating the release of the hostages over continued fighting. Others supported Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing government and urged it to keep up the military pressure on Hamas and Israel’s other enemies.

Parties from across Israel’s political spectrum have recruited candidates from what have become known as the Oct. 7 families. Here are some of the candidates with a chance to win a seat in Parliament:

Shira Shapiro is running with Yashar, the centrist party led by Mr. Netanyahu’s main political rival, Gadi Eisenkot. Ms. Shapiro’s son, Staff Sgt. Aner Shapiro, was on leave from the army on Oct. 7 when he attended the Nova music festival, one of the bloodiest targets of the Hamas-led attack. He took shelter in a crowded roadside bomb shelter and stationed himself by the entrance when gunmen attacked it. As the militants hurled grenades inside, Sergeant Shapiro repeatedly caught the grenades and threw them back out, until he was killed, according to surviving witnesses.

Zvi Mor, the father of a released hostage, Eitan Mor, is running as a candidate for the far-right party Religious Zionism, headed by Bezalel Smotrich. While Eitan was in captivity, Mr. Mor, an educator, founded a forum of right-wing parents of hostages and soldiers who opposed making deals with Hamas and pushed for Israel to defeat the group militarily.

Omri Ronen, a reserve soldier, is running with the left-wing Democrats, led by Yair Golan. His grandmother, Nira Ronen, was killed in her home in Kfar Aza, one of the border communities worst hit in the October 2023 attack, along with her Filipina caregiver, Angelyn Aguirre. Before Oct. 7, Mr. Ronen had been one of the leaders of a grass-roots group of reservists protesting the government’s plan to overhaul the judiciary. He said in a recent television interview that Mr. Netanyahu, whom he called “Mr. Oct. 7,” must go. “The word responsibility has meaning,” he said.

Rafael Ben Shitrit, a former mayor of Beit Shean in northern Israel, is in Yisrael Beitenu, a right-wing opposition party led by Avigdor Liberman. Mr. Ben Shitrit used to belong to Mr. Netanyahu’s conservative Likud party, but abandoned it after his son, Staff Sgt. Elroy Ben Shitrit, was killed in battle on Oct. 7 near the Gaza border. He has been an advocate for an independent state inquiry into what went wrong that day. Mr. Netanyahu has refused such an inquiry, and the opposition parties have pledged to establish one if they are elected.

Sharon Sharabi, also on Yisrael Beitenu’s list of candidates, is the brother of Eli Sharabi, a former hostage who was released from Gaza only to learn that his wife and two teenage daughters had been killed during the Oct. 7 attack. Another brother, Yossi Sharabi, was also taken hostage and killed after 100 days in captivity. Sharon Sharabi campaigned tirelessly for his brothers’ return. When Eli Sharabi was finally released, many Israelis were outraged over how emaciated he looked. “I was shocked,” Sharon said at the time. “I’d been told he would be thin, but I didn’t imagine how thin. It was extreme.”

Tali Gvili, running with Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud party, is the mother of Master Sgt. Ran Gvili, a member of a police counterterrorism unit who was shot and severely wounded in combat on Oct. 7 and then dragged into Gaza. His remains were recovered and returned to Israel in January 2026. The Gvili and Netanyahu families have become close, and the prime minister attended Sergeant Gvili’s state funeral, saying, “Our souls are bound with yours.”

Michal Hirsch Negri is running with Together, a joint slate led by right-wing politician Naftali Bennett and the centrist Yair Lapid. Ms. Hirsch Negri’s son Maj. Roee Negri was killed fighting in Kibbutz Be’eri near the Gaza border on Oct. 7.

Maj. Shahar Varon, a commander in the reserves, is another Together candidate. He fought that day in Kfar Aza, another border community, and later went to fight in Gaza. He was wounded in battle, then went back into Gaza to fight again. “There is life before October 7th, and there is life after,” he wrote recently, adding, “Our government disappeared that morning — but our people showed up instead.”

“I voted for an Arab party because this is about our very existence. If I don’t go out and vote, I won’t have representation in the Knesset, and I won’t have a presence as an Arab citizen living in this country.”

Sara Abu Sayum, 24, an Arab citizen of Israel who voted in the city of Lod.

Since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the war in Gaza that followed, a growing number of Democrats have been under pressure from younger and progressive voters who are a crucial part of their base.

Lawmakers have begun rebuking Israel in ways that were once unimaginable. They have pointed to tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians killed in Gaza and focused much of their ire on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, whose actions and policies have left his country diplomatically isolated and who has become a political lightning rod in the United States. That has put at risk the bipartisan support for military aid that Israel has always counted on from American lawmakers.

A handful of far-right Republicans and libertarians in Congress have also questioned U.S. support for Israel, raising concern about Palestinian deaths and spending American money to defend a far-off ally. But the skepticism is far more widespread among Democrats.

The midterm elections have been shaped in part by Democratic voters’ mounting hostility toward Israel. Party leaders now view the issue as one of the major fault lines they will have to contend with next year if they win back control of Congress in November.

Over the past year, almost half of House Democrats voted to cut off aid to Israel. Democratic leaders who have long been staunch allies have said that the U.S.-Israeli relationship needs a fundamental reset, including a rethinking of the 10-year memorandum of understanding that commits billions of dollars of annual security aid to Israel, which will soon expire.

And Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, who is the highest-ranking Jewish official in the nation, has condemned Mr. Netanyahu on the Senate floor and called for new leadership in Israel.

In recent weeks, top Democrats in the House and the Senate have proposed legislation that would impose sanctions on Israel for building settlements, making clear to Israeli companies and banks that they could be penalized for ties to such activity.

Those moves are in line with what lawmakers are hearing from voters.

A New York Times/Siena national poll conducted in May found that 74 percent of Democratic voters opposed providing additional economic and military support to Israel. A Pew Research Center poll in April found that eight in 10 Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents had an unfavorable view of Israel.

In Jerusalem, officials from the Central Election Committee are overseeing an extensive Election Day operation from Parliament. Committee employees are fanning out to more than 12,000 polling stations wearing body cameras to document irregularities. A desk operated jointly with Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security agency, is scanning the web for disinformation to respond to it in real time.

“This election is the most threatened ever,” said Assaf Shapira, a researcher at the Israel Democracy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank. “The stakes are very high,” he said.

Some experts point to concerns, including the growing sophistication and prevalence of A.I.-generated content, a police force that critics say is increasingly loyal to the far-right minister overseeing it and a sitting Israeli government whose senior officials have repeatedly suggested the vote could be rigged.

The Central Election Committee, a partly political body chaired by a Supreme Court justice and whose administrative branch is composed of nonpartisan officials, is working to bolster confidence in the process and counter false claims of fraud, Dean Livne, the committee’s acting director general, said in an interview.

Tallies from each polling station will be made public within hours of the polls closing, and the counting of roughly 600,000 ballots cast remotely at places like hospitals, embassies, and military bases will be live streamed for nearly 24 hours, according to Mr. Livne.

“This election will be the most transparent ever,” he said.

Election observers agree that the risk of widespread fraud or manipulation of the vote count is exceedingly low. And as of Tuesday afternoon, election officials said there had been no indication of widespread irregularities. But some experts also say that government officials could be laying the groundwork to undermine confidence in the election so that they can then challenge an unfavorable result as rigged.

Throughout the campaign, members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party have questioned the impartiality and qualifications of election officials and suggested that antigovernment groups were plotting to obstruct the vote.

“To challenge the legitimacy of elections, you have to plant the seeds early on,” Yael Shomer, a political scientist at Tel Aviv University, said. “And I think we see them planting the seeds.”

Senior government officials have stopped short of explicitly threatening to reject the election result. Mr. Netanyahu recently said that he would stand to lose the election if too few of his supporters turned out to vote.

Observers warn of disinformation campaigns and attempts to intimidate some voters and deter them from casting their ballots on Election Day.

Such attempts, opposition figures and some experts worry, could involve the Israeli police, which is increasingly seen as serving the interests of the far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir. Some fear that on Election Day, officers could look the other way at pro-government violence or attempts to intimidate voters outside polling stations in areas considered hostile to Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Ben-Gvir.

Israel’s police commissioner, Danny Levy, has vowed to defend the integrity of the vote and said he would dismiss officers who express political views while on duty.

Concerns about voter intimidation are particularly high for Israel’s Arab citizens, who make up roughly 20 percent of the population and typically vote for parties opposed to Mr. Netanyahu’s. Turnout in Arab communities has historically been low, and they have been targeted with largely unsubstantiated allegations of widespread voter fraud by Mr. Netanyahu and his political allies.

Earlier this month, Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s far-right finance minister, announced plans to deploy thousands of religious Jewish “observers” to “prevent fraud in voting and vote-counting in Arab communities.” Critics fear that could instigate chaos and discourage Arab citizens from going out to vote.

Officials in Arab localities are organizing teams to share verified information with their communities to combat disinformation intended to deter voting, including false reports of polling station closures or violence around voting sites, said Abed Shahada, who leads an effort to increase turnout for an organization representing Arab local officials.

“The threats are greater, but there is also a greater awareness of them,” he said. “We’re trying to have one confront the other.”

“Bibi flows in my blood. No one can replace Bibi. He’s strong, a world leader.”

Shoshi Ashtbeker, 47, a school secretary from Tel Aviv, referring to Benjamin Netanyahu, whom she said she’d voted for all her life.

Arab Israelis are overwhelmingly Muslim, with Druse and Christian communities making up around 15 percent. Palestinians living in the Israeli-occupied West Bank are not Israeli citizens and cannot vote.

Recent polls suggest that neither Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing alliance nor the opposition bloc is likely to form a majority without a partnership with Arab parties. Such a stalemate would leave Arab leaders with huge influence on the results.

“The stakes are too high to sit this one out,” said Sireen Jabareen, 30, a director of a rights organization that helps Arab prisoners. She said she would vote for the first time after previously boycotting the political system, which she views as discriminatory toward Arabs. “I don’t want to be the kind of person who clings to rigid principles when reality changes,” she added.

Many others have also stayed home on Election Day in the past, alienated by political leaders, convinced their ballots hold no sway or unwilling to validate a system that they say treats them as second-class citizens.

Arab politicians and local leaders are warning of voter-suppression efforts, through either disinformation campaigns or the presence of armed right-wing activists near polling stations in Arab villages.

Last week, Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud party announced a joint effort with another right-wing party to send 2,000 activists to oversee “voting integrity” in Arab cities and towns. The move was widely seen as an attempt to suppress Arab voters.

In the 2015 election, Mr. Netanyahu sought to prod supporters by saying that Arab voters were “heading to the polls in huge quantities.” After critics accused him of race-baiting, he apologized for any offense caused by the remark.

But on Tuesday, he tried a similar tactic, pointing to apparently high turnout among Arab voters and suggesting that they were “trying to steal the elections.” (Election authorities said there had been no indication of widespread irregularities.) Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud party released a poster showing a crowd of women in hijab, urging right-wing Israelis “not to stay home.”

Yousef Makladeh, a leading pollster focusing on Arab society in Israel, said recent surveys indicated that 65 percent to 70 percent of Arab voters planned to vote on Tuesday. That would be an increase of 12 to 18 percentage points over turnout in the 2022 election.

For the very first time, activists say, efforts to turn out the vote feel like pushing on an open door.

Omar Abu Siyam, a social media personality from Mu’awiya, an Arab village near Haifa, Israel, said that when he told his nearly 90,000 Instagram followers that he had changed his mind and decided to vote, hundreds of commenters responded that they felt the same way.

The most critical issue for Arab voters by a wide margin, Mr. Makladeh said, is the surge in violent crime within their communities, a crisis many say the police have deliberately neglected under Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister.

“Arabs are terrified of what four more years with Ben-Gvir in office will do to us,” said Dr. Thabet Abu Ras, a political geographer who is advising voter-turnout initiatives across Arab municipalities. He added that discriminatory housing policies, resulting in a record number of home demolitions in Arab communities, were also driving voters.

Higher Arab turnout could threaten smaller parties that are more likely to support Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition. By increasing the total number of votes cast, it would raise the threshold for smaller parties to win seats in the Knesset.

“This time,” Dr. Abu Ras said, “the Arab vote is worth gold.”

While parties are barred from buying television time in Israel, they are entitled to seven minutes of free airtime on each of the main television and radio channels — with extra time for every seat that a party holds in the outgoing Parliament. Nightly blocks of election broadcasts, which can run for almost an hour in the two weeks before the ballot, have been a mainstay of campaigns since television arrived here in the 1960s.

The campaign features about a dozen larger parties that are expected to meet, or come close to, the four-seat minimum threshold to enter Parliament.

But every Israeli election also includes an array of esoteric parties run by a gamut of characters from would-be messiahs to pranksters. Of the 38 parties that registered with Israel’s Central Elections Committee, two have since dropped out.

The Pirate Party of Israel has been running in Israeli elections since 2012 on a platform that calls for civil liberties in the digital age as well as free internet and “peace between all the people who live here.” For this election, the party has Dan Ariely — an Israeli American behavioral economist and best-selling author — running in the third slot of its optimistically expansive 24-person slate of candidates.

Another party, Sharshar for Love and Unity, is led by Eitan Shvili, who cosplays a monarch called King Sharshar in full royal regalia complete with a bejeweled crown and a blue cape. His bid for the premiership, clearly a long shot, comes with a promise of a free theater ticket for every Israeli adult.

Gan Eden, or Paradise, party wants to build a society based on peace, justice, freedom and plenty. The party has called for reforming the education system to better connect it with spirituality, removing taxes on basic goods and also promoting dialogue between Jews, Muslims, Christians and other communities — a worthy cause but not one that is likely to carry this party of relative unknowns into the Parliament.

There’s also the Everlasting Covenant for the Salvation of Israel party, which calls for a constitution based on the Torah; and the Bible Bloc, a Jewish-Christian party whose leader, Avi Dennis Lipkin, warns from his living room that Israel must prepare to take in 10 million Jews and non-Jews because of an impending holocaust abroad.

And in what could be seen as a cynical use of the democratic process, the wife and the mother of the Israeli extremist who assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 are leading a party calling for his release from prison. The assassin, Yigal Amir, is serving a life sentence. Israel passed a law in 2001 barring the commutation of a sentence of anyone convicted of assassinating a prime minister, ensuring that Mr. Amir would not be paroled.

“Netanyahu did a lot of big things, but I think he’s done his job. He’s had 20 years in this chair. He can go now.”

Ayelet Veprinskiy, 25, a student in Jerusalem, who said she voted for Naftali Bennett’s Together party.

Depending on how Israel’s complex coalition-building process shakes out, at least two other veteran politicians could also find themselves vying for the prime minister’s chair: Avigdor Liberman, a hard-right former defense minister, and Naftali Bennett, a onetime prime minister who has fiercely argued in favor of Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

Opinion polls in recent months have suggested that Mr. Bennett’s party will secure around a dozen seats in Israel’s 120-member Parliament, or Knesset, while Mr. Liberman’s will collect closer to eight. (Mr. Eisenkot’s party could rack up over 20 seats, according to pre-election polls.)

The political evolutions of Mr. Bennett and Mr. Liberman offer a case study in how Mr. Netanyahu has polarized Israel during his long tenure. The two men should be ideal political partners with the prime minister, as they share many of his hawkish views. Both have worked as advisers to Mr. Netanyahu in the past and even campaigned on his behalf.

Yet they have long since broken with the Israeli leader, and now accuse him of corruption, abuses of power and a willingness to cut deals with extremists in order to remain in charge. Mr. Netanyahu is currently on trial for corruption in three separate but interlocking cases; he has denied all wrongdoing.

A veteran of Israeli politics, Mr. Liberman was born in the Soviet Union and leads the right-wing Yisrael Beitenu party. His base is among the hundreds of thousands of Russian-speaking Jews who similarly emigrated to Israel from the former Communist bloc.

Mr. Liberman lives in the West Bank settlement of Nokdim, and takes a hard-line view on security issues. At one point during the war in Gaza, Mr. Liberman called for Israel to halt all aid, including water, to Palestinians there, even as the enclave faced a humanitarian crisis.

Mr. Bennett served as prime minister from 2021 to 2022, during the sole hiatus in Mr. Netanyahu’s premiership since 2009. Though his party secured only seven seats in Parliament in the preceding election, Mr. Bennett leveraged the opposition’s desire to unseat Mr. Netanyahu and he went from being kingmaker to king.

In office, however, Mr. Bennett presided over a fragile, ideologically discordant coalition that ranged from his right-wing Yamina party to Raam, an Islamist party of Arab citizens of Israel. Many of his voters saw his decision to join with left-wing and Arab parties as a betrayal, and as some of his own lawmakers defected, his government collapsed.

Now, Mr. Bennett is running in alliance with Yair Lapid, a centrist who succeeded him as prime minister in the anti-Netanyahu government. In addition to holding large campaign rallies, Mr. Bennett has released videos of himself holding lengthy, impromptu debates with right-wing voters in the streets and around cafe and restaurant tables.

In this election, both Mr. Liberman and Mr. Bennett have focused much of their campaign messaging on Israel’s ultra-Orthodox minority.

The ultra-Orthodox population is 14 percent of Israel’s total but growing rapidly, and they receive far more state benefits than they contribute in taxes, thanks largely to Mr. Netanyahu, who has relied on their support to stay in power.

Ultra-Orthodox religious students are also largely exempt from mandatory military service. During the war in Gaza, religious and secular Israelis alike were furious at what they saw as a powerful minority shirking the wartime burden.

Mr. Bennett has promised to end what he calls an ultra-Orthodox “state within a state” and compel them to participate in national service.

Mr. Liberman, for his part, has inveighed against what he calls an ultra-Orthodox political push for “us to send our children to the army, to do reserve duty, to work, and pay taxes, while they build their own state.” He has accused them of “trying to dismantle the country.”