‘Gaza’s suffering has become campaign fodder’: Palestinians fear Israel’s election will change little

A friend of Karim Mareesh's was supposed to hold his son's wedding in the coming days. He has put it off until after Israel votes. Mareesh, 43, says the man worried that if Benjamin Netanyahu's far-right government won another term, the war could resume and force him to flee again, costing him his tent and the wedding supplies he had struggled to save.

That small postponement shows how Gaza is watching an election it cannot take part in. As Israelis head to the polls, Palestinians in the territory know their fate rests with the country that has reduced much of Gaza to rubble and killed nearly 75,000 people. Nearly a million displaced Palestinians there live with dire sanitary conditions, water shortages and the constant threat of Israeli strikes. Yet Gaza has been largely absent from the campaign.

Both Netanyahu's coalition and the opposition Yashar party of Gadi Eisenkot have concentrated on destroying Hamas after the 7 October attacks and the trauma they inflicted on Israeli society. The humanitarian catastrophe across the border has received little, if any, attention. Neither man has laid out a clear plan for Gaza's future. Both have vowed to end Hamas rule, and both back Donald Trump's controversial peace plan.

Eisenkot, a former military chief whose party leads Netanyahu's Likud in the polls, has promised to restore Israel's international standing after three years of war. He is not, however, a dove. A senior commander in Israel's 2006 war with Hezbollah, he later championed the "Dahiya doctrine", which called for overwhelming force against civilian areas where militants operated. Critics say that approach has been used in Gaza, causing destruction they argue amounts to war crimes. Eisenkot's son and two nephews were killed fighting in Gaza.

Sami Abu Rumi, 47, from Rafah and now displaced in al-Mawasi, Khan Younis, said he hopes for a government less inclined toward killing and displacement, but sees Israeli governments' thinking as largely similar. "Eisenkot talks of defeating Hamas, while Netanyahu boasts about military operations and the killing of Palestinians," he said. "Gaza's suffering has become campaign fodder." Families, he said, struggle to feed their children, keep them in school and reach medical care.

Inside Israel, the Arab-led Joint List released a 48-second video this week with drone footage of Gaza's ruins. Its voiceover accuses others of behaving as if it were normal that tens of thousands were killed and entire cities turned into wastelands. The party says it "will not be silent" and that rivals "want more destruction. We offer life." Arab parties are very unlikely to join an Eisenkot-led coalition, though they could back it from outside government.

In Gaza, pessimism runs deep. Haneen Hamdouna, 45, from Beit Lahia, also displaced to al-Mawasi, said attacking Gaza seems to have become part of Israeli campaigning. Each new government is hoped to be better, she said, only to prove worse. At best, 200 aid trucks might be allowed in instead of 100, "but that would not mean any real change in our lives." Noor AlMoghanni, 20, from Gaza City, said promises about easing suffering are no longer believed, and that whether Netanyahu wins or loses, the aim as she sees it is to destroy the foundations of life in Gaza.

Most people there are too consumed by the search for food and water to follow the race. Fears of renewed hunger are growing as markets run short of fresh produce. Residents say commercial deliveries have been suspended for about a week, pushing prices up. Flour costs more than three times its earlier price, and shrinking aid leaves families exposed to another food crisis. Israeli restrictions on food and aid have turned hunger into a weapon of war, the report says, and more than 20,000 Palestinian children have been killed since 7 October 2023.

What to watch after the vote is whether aid access changes and whether the war resumes, the question that has put one wedding on hold.