Trump endorses Netanyahu, and settlers attack diplomats
The endorsement came nine days before the election, and the first two polls after it put Eisenkot’s bloc ahead of Netanyahu’s, with no majority without the Arab parties; Gantz left the race. In the West Bank, 10 suspects were arrested over the attacks on a Washington Post photographer and European diplomats.
On October 18, 2026, at 10:45 a.m. Washington time, Donald Trump published on Truth Social what he presented as a “complete and total” endorsement of Benjamin Netanyahu — called a “Great Warrior Prime Minister” and an “even greater peace partner in fighting the Islamic Republic of Iran.” The text adds the condition behind it: if Israel has “the wrong leader, which would be anyone other than Bibi,” the United States would have to do the job alone, and Trump says he is not inclined to do so. The Israeli election is on October 27, 2026, nine days later, and the first two polls published after the endorsement — those of Channel 13 and Channel 12 — give no majority to either bloc.
What the election decides
Voters will elect the 26th Knesset, with 120 seats divided among the lists that pass 3.25% of valid votes, and the government comes from a 61-seat coalition, not from the most-voted party. It is the first Israeli national election since October 7, 2023, which makes it a measure of what remains politically of the wartime government. Netanyahu’s Likud anchors the nationalist and religious bloc; the opposition has organized into two tickets, that of Naftali Bennett with Yair Lapid and that of Gadi Eisenkot.
On Monday night, October 19, 2026, the opposition lost a name the race was still expecting. Benny Gantz announced that he will not be a candidate: “I will not run in the next election. I will keep fighting for unity.” Blue and White, the party he founded in 2019 and which made him Netanyahu’s main rival for three elections in a row, was already polling below the threshold in the surveys, and his lawmakers had moved to Eisenkot’s ticket. Gantz spent recent months calling for a “broad Zionist government” — including with Netanyahu — and his exit consolidates the race into two blocs.
The polls after the endorsement
The first batch of polls after the endorsement came out on Monday and shows a tight race, with the opposition ahead, and neither side reaching 61 seats without the Arab parties. Channel 13 gives 51 seats to Eisenkot’s bloc against 50 to Netanyahu’s bloc; Channel 12 gives 55 to 51. It is the same pollster that, on October 12, 2026, projected Eisenkot’s party at 23 seats, Likud at 20 and Bennett’s ticket at 13, with Netanyahu’s bloc at 49. The series tracked by the Economist had Likud and Eisenkot tied at 22. A Filber Institute survey for Channel 14, on October 12, 2026, projected Likud at 29 seats and the governing bloc at 61, the minimum to govern: it is an institute that polls for an audience aligned with Netanyahu, and the divergence is recorded as such, with no average between the two.
The reaction to the endorsement followed internal divisions. Netanyahu thanked him in Hebrew, with a 35-second video and the line “together we will complete the mission.” Eisenkot replied that “only the citizens of Israel will decide who will be prime minister and who will form the government” and recalled having asked for no outside interference. Bennett said that, in international politics, every leader works with the elected leader. In the opposition, Yair Lapid and Avigdor Lieberman attacked what Lieberman called a preference for dealing with Israel through a “Bibi puppet.” According to Axios, it is the first time a United States president has explicitly endorsed an Israeli candidate; in 2019, Trump backed Netanyahu, but the White House denied it was a formal endorsement.
The weekend in the West Bank
On October 16, 2026, in Abu Falah, near Ramallah, dozens of masked settlers attacked Palestinians harvesting olives and Washington Post photographer Heidi Levine, who was wearing a vest marked “Press.” She was knocked down and kicked repeatedly for more than 10 minutes, lost cameras, phone, passport and wallet, and was hospitalized in Ramallah with a broken vertebra. The Red Crescent counted at least six wounded at the scene.
“I was attacked, pushed to the ground. Luckily I had the vest and the helmet, otherwise I probably would not be here, because they kept kicking and kicking me,” said Levine.
The next day, in Taybeh, a Christian village northeast of Ramallah, settlers attacked a diplomatic convoy from France, Belgium and Poland, with Catholic representatives. The Belgian consulate window was broken and a French mayor, Bernard Baudoux, appears in video thrown to the ground. The Israel Defense Forces said that there were no soldiers on site and that the visit had not been coordinated, condemning “the grave act of violence”; the police opened an investigation. Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar condemned what he called grave acts of violence, and President Isaac Herzog called the episode outrageous. Netanyahu’s office said the diplomats had entered a “sensitive area, with a history of clashes, without prior coordination,” and said the facts about what happened to Levine “are unclear.”
The response came in the early hours of Monday, October 19, 2026, with 10 suspects arrested for taking part in the two attacks, among them a minor, in a police operation with Shin Bet, the internal security service. The commander of the West Bank division, Major General Moshe Finchi, said that “we will not accept harm to journalists, foreign diplomats and civilians” and that the investigation continues. France demanded punishment for those responsible and the European diplomacy chief, Kaja Kallas, condemned the attack “in the strongest terms.”
The available figures come from organizations that count what the authorities do not count. The Israeli group Yesh Din recorded at least 170 settler attacks since September 27, 2026, the start of the harvest; the Palestinian commission against settlements counted 219 attacks by settlers and Israeli forces in the first 12 days of October, 136 of them linked to the harvest, with four dead and more than 100 wounded in the last month. Belgian Foreign Minister Maxime Prévot summed up the European position in one sentence: “As the occupying power, the Israeli authorities must protect Palestinians, guarantee the safety of diplomats and journalists and bring those responsible to justice. Impunity for violent settlers must end.”
What sustains impunity
Settler violence has defenders inside the government and is how the occupation expands while the election decides who administers it. The record of this Monday’s arrests is the usual one, and the historical series explains why: according to Yesh Din, of the investigations opened between 2005 and 2023 into settler violence against Palestinians, just over 3% ended in conviction, and more than 80% were closed without charges.
In Gaza, the ceasefire of October 10, 2025 did not stop the killing. The Health Ministry toll released on October 19, 2026 records 74,475 dead and 175,517 wounded since October 2023, with 1,517 deaths after the ceasefire and more than 5,400 wounded since then; four people, among them a child, died in the last 24 hours. The humanitarian situation as of October 2, 2026 points to about 279,000 people in 400 displacement sites subject to flooding and 2,300 living in buildings that need to be demolished, in a territory whose reconstruction the World Bank estimates at $53 billion. In Lebanon, the cessation of hostilities that began on April 16, 2026 did not interrupt the routine of violations: over one weekend in August 2026, the United Nations (UN) peacekeeping mission counted 455 Israeli projectiles in the south of the country and 97 airspace violations.
Europe has an instrument and does not use it. After concluding there were signs of breach of Article 2 of the Association Agreement, the European Commission proposed sanctions and the suspension of trade provisions, and the Council approved on May 28, 2026 a third package against extremist settlers and Hamas figures. Sanctioning National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir remains without unanimity among member states, and suspending the trade pillar of the agreement has no majority.
With the vote on October 27, 2026, Israel decides whether to keep in government the bloc that makes settlement expansion state policy and whether to keep, at its head, the man who just received the first United States presidential endorsement in the country’s history, now with two polls showing the endorsement did not give him a majority. What is not at stake in any electoral dispute is the price charged to Palestinians between the campaign and the inauguration: 10 arrested in one night, 3% of convictions in 18 years of investigations, 74,475 dead in Gaza and an olive harvest that remains under attack.