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This programme contains some scenes which some viewers may find upsetting.

Hello and welcome to Global Eye from the BBC World Service.

I'm Shaina Oppenheimer, and this week we're in Israel

and the occupied Palestinian territories.

Coming up on the programme, I've been speaking to young

Jewish Israelis ahead of the upcoming election

here to find out the answer to a political anomaly.

Why are young Jewish Israelis

more likely to say they are right wing

than Gen Z voters in other countries?

And we take you inside Gaza for an immersive

look at how Palestinians are coping amid

the destruction of the infrastructure

they rely on to survive,

and as casualties mount from continuing Israeli attacks.

This is Tel Aviv, one of Israel's most liberal cities.

And we're about to meet some young Israelis

who are coming of age at a time of massive political change.

Just over half a million

young Israelis will be voting for the first time.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

is facing a strong challenge from Gadi Eisenkot,

a former army chief. But although the two

men are on opposing sides in the Israeli election,

politically they're both on the right.

And that tells you something

pretty significant about politics in Israel.

And in particular, the politics of young people.

While Gen Zs in other parts of the world may be more left wing,

young Israelis are pulling further and further right.

So what's behind this change? I'm here to find out.

Michal and Yonatan are first-time voters.

I'm a liberal. Yeah. As much as much as you can be.

I grew up in a political house.

We talked political since I was seven.

I think we all really liberal, very liberal.

But in Israel, what does being liberal

actually mean? For Yonatan,

there is no contradiction between being liberal

and supporting Israel's military policies in Gaza.

You need to solve this problem

because if you let... like, leave Gaza alone right now,

you have no guarantee that Hamas wouldn't rise again

and there won't be another October 7th.

Both Michal and Yonatan are strong supporters

of equal rights for all, though unlike Yonatan,

Michal, who will be voting

for Israel's most left-wing Jewish party,

explicitly brought up Palestinians in the West Bank,

and thinks equal rights for them should be a priority.

I think the most important of

this is equal rights to everybody.

I really care about, like, LGBTQ rights.

I really care about the rights of people living in the West Bank.

Tomer and Oren are also both 18.

I'm centre right, so I do believe...

And also a little bit ideologies to the left.

So inequality, left, is, uh,

is a strong characteristic. And in the right,

I do believe in economics and, uh, security.

So security I'm more into the right.

And I'm not an extremist, but I do believe...

But I'm leaning more, like, centre right.

I won't pretend to like parts about my current government.

I very much don't agree with him.

And the things I do agree are things that he did not even set.

Like the way we treat the economy.

It's mostly stuff that I'm leaning right towards,

but still, I don't have anything right now

in mind that I can agree that he did well.

But... So that's

why the most important thing for me is, right now, change.

Polls suggests that Benjamin Netanyahu

and Gadi Eisenkot are neck and neck in the race to be Prime Minister.

On one side is a Netanyahu-led coalition

that has empowered right-wing settlers,

clashed with key state institutions, and faced fierce criticisms over

the failures that preceded the October 7th attacks.

Netanyahu has also

been indicted on serious corruption charges,

which he denies. He paints himself

as the only leader who can keep Israel safe.

CROWD CHEERS

Netanyahu's coalition partners, who represent ultra-Orthodox Jews

as well as the Israeli far right,

will also be standing in the election.

And there are a number of Arab parties on the ballot,

despite attempts

by Netanyahu's government to disqualify them.

They will mainly be vying for the votes

of Palestinian citizens of Israel,

who make up around one fifth of the population.

..Eisenkot!

Gadi Eisenkot's Yashar party is seen by supporters

as a steadier

and more pragmatic alternative to Netanyahu's coalition,

but Eisenkot remains

firmly hawkish on key security issues.

It's really striking that views like Eisenkot's,

which would have once been considered staunchly right wing,

are now often cast as the moderate alternative.

And it's telling that some of

the young Israelis I've been speaking to

are now considering a vote for Eisenkot.

He has experience. He was Ramatkal.

He was like... I think he was...

He did a lot of great things in politics in general.

So I think he's the most realistic opponent.

And in general terms, I don't

completely agree with his political views,

but I think he's realistic. He's charismatic.

I think he can lead the country, uh, pretty well.

I think that Eisenkot is the safe choice

because he's in the middle, a little bit more to the right,

but this is more or less into the middle.

An ever present is the spectre of

the October 7th attacks on Israel by Hamas.

In 2023,

around 1,200 Israelis were killed and 251 were taken hostage

in multiple attacks by Hamas-led militants from Gaza.

In response, Israel launched a military offensive in Gaza...

...triggering a war

that has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians,

according to Gaza's Hamas-run health ministry,

whose figures are considered reliable by the UN.

But for these young voters,

the importance of October 7th lies in the intelligence

failures they perceive

to have been made by Netanyahu's government.

If you had a party that was in the head during the biggest

disgrace in the history of Israel,

they need to take responsibility and we need to change.

We need a change.

I am looking right now at, uh...

...at the safety of my country. So right now,

since the 7th of October,

I'm going next year to the army.

I want the safety of my people.

As for Michal and Oren, who lean more to the left,

October 7th polarised them in a different direction.

I became more liberal and more open to the Arab community

because of it, because I saw more of it.

The most important thing

for me right now is a State Committee of Inquiry.

Like, to investigate everything that just happened with October 7th

and ever since then.

I think what's really striking

to me is that some of the people we just spoke to,

who are voting for pretty right-wing

parties, see themselves as centrists,

and even in some ways, liberal.

And I think that really just goes to show how much

the political centre in Israel has shifted,

that you can identify as being relatively liberal,

supporting certain liberal values

like gay marriage and civil marriage,

which currently doesn't exist in Israel,

but you want to see a strong military.

According to polling, three quarters of first-time Jewish voters

in Israel identify as right or centre right.

This is part of a gradual shift in the Israeli public

that started after the breakdown of the Oslo Accords in the 1990s.

Since then, discourse on the two-state solution

has largely disappeared from

the public debate among Jewish voters.

Supporting a two-state solution with separate independent states

for Israelis and Palestinians

was once associated with liberalism in Israel.

Now, it seems young Israelis

are redefining what liberalism means.

Of course, a lot of Israelis will also be voting for Netanyahu.

We're on our way now to meet with Nof, an activist for Likud.

Nof has expressed some extreme views

about Palestinians, views that are also shared

by others within the Likud and across the Israeli right.

I think there is no civilian in Gaza or in Judea and Samaria.

Nof called the occupied West Bank Judea and Samaria,

Biblical names used to emphasise Jewish claims to

the land, and denying the existence of Palestinian civilians portrays

an entire population as legitimate targets.

Similar rhetoric from Israeli leaders

has been cited

in the genocide case at the International Court of Justice,

which Israel rejects, and such views have

been echoed within Netanyahu's right-wing coalition.

Nof is backing Netanyahu.

So why have

so many young Israelis shifted to the right?

Netanyahu has long pursued a policy

of what is referred to in Israel as managing the conflict.

He has actively blocked, moves towards Palestinian statehood

and sought to prevent any Palestinian attacks

or acts of resistance taking place on Israeli soil.

The separation barrier,

which began construction in the early 2000s,

has made it harder

for Palestinians from the occupied West Bank to come into Israel.

As a result, many Israelis have

had almost no interaction with Palestinians,

nor are they aware

of Palestinians' day-to-day realities.

International journalists are largely blocked

from reporting in Gaza,

and domestic media of life in Gaza is scant.

Over the past three years,

international criticisms of Israel's military

conduct have increasingly been painted here

as unwarranted and attributed to a global rise in antisemitism.

Netanyahu has dismissed warrants for his arrest over

alleged war crimes by the International Criminal Court.

So for many first-time voters,

the treatment of Palestinians is not on their minds.

Nor is the conduct of the military seen as something

that significantly divides Israel's mainstream parties.

For them and many others voting, this election is about

the future of Israel's Jewish citizens,

and whether or not those in power abide by democratic norms

and institutional checks and balances.

But even if Netanyahu loses,

the results would still reflect broad support

for an increasingly

right-wing vision of Israel, one that projects military strength,

maintains control over Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza,

and prioritises democratic rights and freedoms

for its Jewish citizens

without resolving the Palestinian issue.

Of course, the war in Gaza has cast

a long shadow over these elections, but it's rare

that voters here are shown a true

picture of life in the territory.

In spite of the many difficulties,

the BBC World Service worked with Palestinian

film-makers inside Gaza across

the summer as a ceasefire faltered and bombardment continued.

How are Gazans coping with the near total destruction

of infrastructure they rely on to survive?

And in hospitals, how are doctors and nurses helping children recover

from life-changing injuries, without critical medicines?

And with peace negotiations at a political deadlock,

how are families trying

to survive continued Israeli military attacks,

attacks that have killed

more than 100 people each month since April 2026.

This is Gaza's Ceasefire Summer.

President Trump has confirmed

that Israel and Hamas have agreed to the first phase of his plan.

...paving the way for a ceasefire and the release of the remaining hostages...

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You can watch the full version of Gaza's Ceasefire Summer

on BBC iPlayer or the BBC World Service YouTube channel.

Here's another piece of World Service

content that's got people's attention this week.

Megha Mohan from BBC Global Women

sat down with Meredith Whittaker,

president of the Signal Foundation,

to talk about the gender politics of Silicon Valley, AI,

and the future of technology.

In a world where tech bros tend to dominate the conversation,

here was a woman at the very top of the industry having her say,

which is perhaps why clips from the interview

got millions of views on social media.

You can watch the full interview on

the BBC News website or the BBC YouTube channel.

Thanks for joining me this week in Jerusalem.

Global Eye will be back next week. Goodbye.