The Financial Times publishes a piece on the election. Focusing on Netanyahu, they say that after his tenure was ended last year by an unwieldy eight-party coalition united mainly by its members’ desire to oust him, he finds himself the challenger for the first time in more than a decade. But his push to win back power is complicated by his trial on corruption charges relating to his relationships with wealthy businesspeople and media magnates during his time in office.

The Independent publishes four factors that could influence the outcome of the Israeli election: turnout, threshold, power brokers and unexpected diplomatic changes.

The Guardian reports that a gun attack in the flashpoint West Bank city of Hebron wounded five people on Saturday, including four Israelis and one Palestinian. The assailant was shot dead, Israel’s emergency services and the army have said. Itamar Ben-Gvir has allegedly claimed that his home was the target.

The Guardian also releases an interactive map showing how protests in Iran spread between 16 September and 21 October, fuelled by public outrage over a crackdown that has led to the deaths of other young women and girls. Now in their seventh week, the protests show no sign of ending.

Kan Radio reports that the number of intelligence warnings about planned terror attacks has reached a record high. The security establishment has intelligence about almost 100 planned attacks. The warnings are not specific for Election Day but the security establishment is worried about terror attacks tomorrow, particularly after there were two terror attacks in one day, in Kiryat Arab and Nabi Musa. The police have sent about 200 Border Police forces as reinforcements to Judea and Samaria and the Jerusalem seamline. It comes in light of a car ramming into soldiers at the Nebi Moussa junction in the Jordan Valley that injured five soldiers and a shooting attack in Kiryat Arba that left one dead.

In Yediot Ahronot, Yossi Yehoshua writes of the new peak in terrorism. The statistics of 2022 are awful: 25 people have been murdered in 2,204 terror attacks since the beginning of the year. For comparison’s sake, in all of 2015—the year of the knife terrorism—the number was 29 murder victims in 2,558 terror attacks. The number of murder victims was over 20 in 2021 as well, the year in which the IDF launched Operation Guardian of the Walls, a year in which 2,135 terror attacks were recorded. He writes that terrorism started inside the Green Line, with terror attacks in Beer Sheva and Hadera, in which the terrorists were Israeli citizens who came from Hura and Umm el-Fahm. This came as a surprise to the security establishment: The Judea and Samaria Division, under the Central Command, had prepared for an escalation in its sector, but the blow landed in the country’s very heart. After that, events shifted to northern Samaria, to Jenin, and from there to Nablus. In Jenin, the IDF, in coordination with the political leadership, stopped its offensive actions and did not enter the refugee camp for half a year so as to allow the Palestinian Authority’s security forces get the job done. That didn’t work: the PA lost control, requiring the army and the IDF to restart its offensive activity against the terrorist infrastructure. That took a toll. In the other hotspot, Nablus, the Lion’s Den organisation, which was born on social media, grew in size and successfully committed terror attacks in the Samaria area. Like the Jenin refugee camp, the PA security forces were first tasked with the problem, and for weeks they failed yet again, until the army took charge and delivered it a major blow. That said, it bears noting that the score with the murderers of Ido Baruch from Givati has yet to be settled.

In Yediot Ahronot, Nadav Eyal writes that terrorism often gets the last word in Israeli elections. When that happens, it is usually center-left governments that pay the electoral price…A wave of terrorism has been underway in the past several months in Judea and Samaria. Yesterday, 35 hours before the polls are scheduled to open, the lead item in the main evening news programs was the funeral of Ronen Hanania, who was murdered by a terrorist in Hebron. There are two views within the political establishment about that issue. The first holds that incidents of that kind no longer have much impact on the voters, who are voting in an election for the fifth time. They have already decided. Their opinion isn’t going to be changed, and certainly not by terror attacks that get committed regardless of which government happens to be in power. The second view ascribes more importance to the emotional impact [that attacks have]. The proponents of that view hold that since that the gap between the two blocs is so small, even a shift by 20,000 people—from the National Unity Party to the Likud or the Religious Zionist Party, for example—could change everything. That is why every terror attack is so significant and its impact is necessarily dramatic. The article also comments on the relationship between Netanyahu and Itamar Ben Gvir. Netanyahu chose to ride on the backs of the extremists and Kahanists because he viewed Smotrich and Ben Gvir as the messiah’s donkey. Guess who the messiah is in that analogy. The problem is that in the past few days it’s become patently clear that it isn’t a donkey that he’s been trying to ride, but rather a tiger—a ravenous tiger.

Kan Radio reports that Turkey is once again advertising itself in Israel, for the first time since the ambassadors were recalled by both countries about four and a half years ago. In wake of improved relations between Ankara and Jerusalem, the Turks bought space in the international tourism fair that will be held in Tel Aviv at the start of next year. Tourism Minister Yoel Razvozov said that tourism was a bridge to peace and that now that Prime Minister Lapid had resolved the crisis in relations between the two countries, the Turks were expressing their renewed confidence in Israel.