Election Day in Israel: Netanyahu Votes Under a Treason Complaint, an ICC Warrant, and His Own Corruption Trial

The order matters. So here it is in order.

The treason complaint

On Monday, the day before the vote, Yisrael Beytenu leader Avigdor Liberman — a former defense minister — wrote to Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara demanding a criminal investigation of Netanyahu for treason.

The complaint rests on reporting by Israel’s Channel 12: that over the past month Netanyahu pressed the heads of the security establishment to take steps that could create a “miscalculation” with Iran — an action the military feared could reignite the war — and that IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir resisted and sought signed legal authorization before acting. Army Radio carried similar details, citing two senior security officials. Liberman, in the Jerusalem Post’s account of his letter, cast the alleged push as an attempt to drag Israel into fighting that could delay or derail today’s ballot itself.

His words: “The attempt to drag Israel to a war on the eve of the election, coupled with the willingness to sacrifice IDF soldiers just because he’s afraid of an election loss, are a betrayal of the state, its security and IDF soldiers.”

To be precise about what this is: it is a complaint and a demand for an investigation. No investigation has been opened and no charge has been filed, and the underlying report rests on anonymous sourcing. Netanyahu’s office called it “fake news” and “nonsense”; Defense Minister Israel Katz said there was never any intention of initiating an attack on Iran before the election.

Opposition leader Gadi Eisenkot, the former IDF chief now leading in final polls, warned Netanyahu not to “dare to place your own political interests above the security of the state.” Democrats leader Yair Golan called Netanyahu “a security threat to Israel.”

The reason the complaint lands is that it does not stand alone. It is the second time in three years that Netanyahu’s own security establishment has accused him of putting himself ahead of the country’s safety. The first time cost 1,200 lives.

The October 7 debt

On Saturday, thousands gathered at Hostages Square in Tel Aviv, in a protest organized by the October Council, demanding accountability for the failures of October 7, 2023 — and a state commission of inquiry.

Netanyahu has refused for three years to establish one. Every other major failure in Israel’s history got one. This one would examine his government, his security establishment, and his own decisions in the years and hours before the deadliest attack in the country’s history.

Eisenkot has vowed to establish the inquiry if he wins — and says it should scrutinize his own record as a former chief of staff, too.

The environment he built

October 7 did not happen in a vacuum Netanyahu inherited. It happened inside a strategy he ran for a decade: keep Hamas in power in Gaza, keep the Palestinian Authority weak in the West Bank, and keep the Palestinians divided — so that no unified partner, and no Palestinian state, could ever be on the table.

At a March 2019 meeting of Likud Knesset members, he said it out loud, as reported by Haaretz and multiple Israeli sources: “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas. This is part of our strategy — to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.” Netanyahu denied the quote to TIME in 2024. The policy underneath it is denied by no one: from 2018, his government facilitated Qatari cash — suitcases of it — flowing into Hamas-run Gaza, a policy the New York Times’ “Buying Quiet” investigation documented from Israeli officials’ own accounts. His finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, had said the same thing in 2015: the Palestinian Authority is “a burden,” and Hamas is “an asset.”

He wanted an extremist governing Gaza, because an extremist governing Gaza was the standing argument against ever having to negotiate. He got the divide he wanted. Then October 7 happened inside it.

The warnings

The record of what reached Netanyahu’s government before the attack is no longer seriously in dispute. What he personally did with it is the fight that now sits in court.

Israeli intelligence obtained Hamas’s actual battle plan — a roughly 40-page document code-named “Jericho Wall,” laying out the invasion point by point — more than a year before the attack, and dismissed it as aspirational. A Unit 8200 analyst who flagged Hamas training for that exact plan in July 2023 was told the scenario was imaginary. Female surveillance soldiers on the border reported Hamas rehearsing the breach, the kibbutz seizures, the hostage-taking. They were dismissed too.

Foreign governments warned him directly. Egyptian officials say they warned Israel repeatedly that a big operation was coming; Egypt’s intelligence chief, Abbas Kamel, reportedly telephoned Netanyahu personally about ten days before the attack to warn of “something unusual, a terrible operation,” and a U.S. House committee chairman confirmed Egypt warned Israel again three days out. Haaretz has reported that the president of the UAE also alerted Netanyahu roughly ten days before. Netanyahu’s office denies receiving the Egyptian warning and calls the UAE account “an absolute lie.”

His own Shin Bet chief is now suing him over it. Ronen Bar’s lawsuit alleges he warned Netanyahu in writing in February 2023, raised the prospect of an attack in person that July, and warned again through September and early October — and that Netanyahu favored “quiet at any cost,” rejected or delayed plans to kill senior Hamas figures, and kept Qatari money flowing into Gaza despite warnings that some of it was reaching Hamas’s military wing. Netanyahu disputes Bar’s account.

Then there is the night itself. Shin Bet logged unusual indications from 11 p.m. on October 6. At 3:03 a.m. it sent an electronic warning. At 3:55 a.m., a call flagged the intelligence to the prime minister’s own military secretariat. Around 5:15 a.m., Bar ordered the military secretary updated again. The call that reached Netanyahu’s wake-up staff came at about 6:13 a.m. — and his military secretary, Maj. Gen. Avi Gil, chose not to wake him. Netanyahu’s official schedule says he was woken at 6:29 a.m., the minute the attack began. Gil now says it was actually 6:40, and claims stenographers were instructed to alter transcripts to make the first call read 6:29. Netanyahu campaigns on the line that “they should have woken me — it would not have happened.” Bar’s answer is in his lawsuit: the warnings reached the prime minister’s office all night long, through the channel the prime minister himself appointed.

The festival

The Nova festival is where the warnings met the ground. The festival’s original site in southern Israel fell through, and two days before the event the organizers moved it to a clearing near Kibbutz Re’im — roughly three miles from the Gaza fence.

The IDF’s own investigation found that the army approved the festival and then provided it nothing: no military forces assigned to guard it, no security coordination, no liaison, no inspections — and most forces in the sector never even knew it was taking place. The festival only ran into October 7 at all because officers, after first objecting, approved a one-day extension. The Northern Brigade commander who had signed the approval visited the site about an hour before the attack began, with the overnight warnings already circulating, and decided not to reinforce. Two days earlier, two commando brigades had been transferred away from the Gaza border to the West Bank.

378 people were murdered at the festival. 44 were taken hostage.

The warrant — and the genocide findings

Since November 21, 2024, Netanyahu has been wanted by the International Criminal Court: a war crime charge of starvation as a method of warfare, and crimes against humanity including murder, persecution and other inhumane acts, alongside former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. He is listed as at large.

The warrant does not expire, and the charges carry no statute of limitations. The ICC’s 125 member states — most of Europe, Canada, Britain, Australia — are treaty-bound to arrest him if he sets foot on their soil. He already avoids most of Europe. The legal argument some governments have leaned on is the immunity of a sitting head of government. That argument leaves office when he does.

One thing the warrant does not yet say is genocide. The findings do.

All five acts

The 1948 Genocide Convention lists five prohibited acts. Committing any one of them with intent to destroy a group, in whole or in part, is genocide.

On September 16, 2025, the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel has committed four of the five: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm; deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s physical destruction; and imposing measures intended to prevent births. The Commission found genocidal intent was the only reasonable inference from the evidence, named Netanyahu, President Herzog and Gallant as having incited genocide, and called for genocide charges to be added to the ICC warrants. This month it said the genocide continued after the ceasefire.

The fifth act — forcibly transferring children of the group to another group — has been pointed to as well. Palestinian children arrested in the occupied territory are routinely transferred out of it and imprisoned inside Israel, a practice documented for years by Israeli organizations B’Tselem and HaMoked and by Defense for Children International Palestine. And in September 2026, Ben Gvir formalized a “Disengagement” plan to remove 1.86 million Palestinians — cited as evidence of the fifth act in the five-point record documented at PoliVion’s sister site, Israel Is Committing Genocide.

The declarations have come from every direction. The International Association of Genocide Scholars — the field’s own professional body — resolved in August 2025, with 86% of voting members, that Israel’s conduct meets the legal definition of genocide. Amnesty International reached the same conclusion in December 2024, its first genocide determination in sixty years. B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, published its conclusion in July 2025 under the title “Our Genocide.” South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice remains pending; the Court found the claim plausible in January 2024 and issued binding provisional measures, which Israel has not complied with. Israel rejects the genocide charge.

The genocide, in other words, has been found — by the UN’s commission, by the scholars who study genocide for a living, by Israeli human rights investigators themselves. It simply has not been charged at The Hague. Yet.

The Istanbul trial

On October 23, Istanbul’s 11th High Criminal Court held the first hearing in the trial in absentia of Netanyahu and 34 other Israeli officials and commanders, on charges including genocide and crimes against humanity arising from the attacks on the Gaza flotilla missions. The court upheld arrest warrants and Red Notice requests for all 35. Prosecutors are seeking aggravated life sentences plus terms ranging from 1,102 to 4,596 years per defendant — sought, not imposed. The next hearing is March 30, 2027.

Rome prosecutors are running a parallel investigation and expanded it on October 16, over allegations that detained flotilla activists were abused.

What it means for Ben Gvir

National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir has no ICC warrant — precision matters, and the Hague warrant names only Netanyahu and Gallant. But he is a named defendant in the Istanbul trial, with the same warrant and Red Notice requests upheld against him on October 23; he is inside the scope of the Rome flotilla investigation; and since 2025 he has been personally sanctioned, with travel bans, by the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and other Western governments over incitement to settler violence.

The alliance itself is the subject of The Bibi Files — the Oscar-shortlisted documentary built from more than 1,000 hours of leaked police interrogation footage from Netanyahu’s own corruption cases, a film that cannot legally be screened in Israel and that Tucker Carlson has promoted to his American audience. Its argument, in producer Alex Gibney’s telling on Carlson’s show, is that once Netanyahu heard “the sound of the possibility of the jail door slamming shut,” he took Israel in a darker direction: a judicial overhaul aimed at the courts trying him, and a government built with Ben Gvir and Smotrich. In the film’s account, insiders say the far right has every incentive to prolong the war rather than end it — and that the fear the extremists generate is not a side effect of Netanyahu’s survival strategy. It is the strategy: a frightened country does not change leaders mid-war.

His power, though, is entirely domestic — and entirely borrowed. Ben Gvir’s ministry exists because Netanyahu’s coalition needs his party, Otzma Yehudit. Final polls show the Netanyahu bloc falling well short of a majority and Otzma Yehudit itself losing ground. If the bloc falls, Ben Gvir does not fall with a government he can blame from opposition: ministers under international indictment-by-association do not get recycled into the next coalition. An Eisenkot government would also inherit the files — the state commission of inquiry into October 7 would examine the era of a national security minister who armed civilian militias and ran the police as a political instrument. For Ben Gvir, Netanyahu’s shield was never legal. It was arithmetic. Today the arithmetic is being counted.

And the fraud

Last, because it is the least of it: Netanyahu is also Israel’s first sitting prime minister to stand trial. Indicted in November 2019, on trial since May 2020, in three cases — the gifts case (a years-long supply of cigars and champagne from billionaires, and favors alleged in return), the newspaper case (recorded negotiations to trade coverage for action against a rival paper; the deal never happened), and the Bezeq case, the only bribery charge, where the judges themselves have twice told prosecutors they see “difficulties in establishing bribery” and urged a plea deal the prosecution refused.

He finished testifying in June, after 98 hearings. There is no verdict date. Over the trial hangs his November 2025 request for a presidential pardon — no admission, no apology, no promise to retire — publicly backed by Donald Trump and still undecided, with the Justice Ministry’s own Pardons Department telling President Herzog it cannot recommend it. The full breakdown of the three cases is its own story. This one is about everything above it.

If he loses

Losing the election does not arrest him, charge him, or convict him. Every case above proceeds exactly as it does today.

What a loss removes is the protection around the cases. No more trial postponements for security crises and diplomatic duties — the accommodations of a sitting prime minister. No Knesset majority to legislate his way out, through judicial overhaul or an immunity law. No head-of-government immunity argument left to make at foreign borders. A pardon request that reads very differently once its author is a private citizen. A plea deal whose main price — his retirement from politics — would already be paid. And a state commission of inquiry, promised by his rival, into the catastrophe he has spent three years refusing to investigate.

Israel has imprisoned a prime minister before: Ehud Olmert served about sixteen months for bribery. Fraud and breach of trust carry up to three years per count; bribery, up to ten.

Polls close tonight, with exit polls expected around 4 p.m. Eastern. Final surveys put Eisenkot’s bloc at 52 to 56 seats and Netanyahu’s at 48 to 50 — neither at the 61 needed to govern alone. Whatever Israelis decide about their government today, Netanyahu’s court dates are already set. The only question the ballot answers is whether he meets them as prime minister, or as a defendant.

Our read

*Analysis, labeled as such.* Every legal threat to Netanyahu runs on its own clock — Jerusalem, The Hague, Istanbul — and none of them cares who wins today. What the office gives him is not innocence; it is delay, leverage and a legal theory of immunity that expires with his tenure. That is why a man facing no immediate arrest fought this election like his freedom was on the ballot. In every way that matters, it is.