Israel election: Benny Gantz drops out after polls put party below threshold
The former war cabinet minister will not run on October 27. Polls put Blue and White below 3.25 percent. Eisenkot calls the move “correct” and “responsible”.
Archive image · Photo: Reuven Kopitchinski / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 (cropped and resized)
Israeli opposition politician Benny Gantz has withdrawn from the October 27 parliamentary election. The Blue and White leader said on Monday he would not run but would “continue to work for unity”. Polls had put his party below the 3.25 percent threshold needed to enter the 120-seat Knesset.
Gantz served in a unity government with Benjamin Netanyahu from 2020 to 2021 and joined his war cabinet after the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023. He quit in June 2024, saying Netanyahu was preventing Israel from advancing toward “true victory”. Yashar leader Gadi Eisenkot, a possible candidate for prime minister, called Gantz's decision “correct” and “responsible”.
According to polls, Netanyahu's Likud and the right-wing coalition it leads are in a tight race with a Zionist opposition alliance, and neither bloc is expected to win a majority. Both rule out governing with the Arab-led lists, which polls project to win 13 seats combined.