Little has changed in Ofakim, a working-class Israeli town hit by Hamas, in the month since the Palestinian militant group’s devastating assaults across the country’s south; houses hit by rocket-propelled grenades haven’t been repaired, and bullet-ridden vehicles still line the streets.
On Ha-Tamar Street, where about 20 people were killed, Arsem Miller, 25, was the only builder at work on Thursday afternoon. He was already working on the house before the events of 7 October, he said, and the scaffolding and paneless windows were the reason he believes Hamas fighters skipped the building on their rampage, thinking it was empty.
“There has been not much help from the government – we are left to do everything ourselves,” he said. “My wife took the baby to Romania, where we are from, on a one-way ticket, but I had to stay to work. I don’t know when they will come back.
“I always voted for Netanyahu or Bennett [Naftali, a rightwing politician] but he has to go now. They were asleep at the wheel.”
To put it mildly, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister and head of the conservative Likud party, is a divisive figure. To supporters, he is “King Bibi”, the self-described “Mr Security and Mr Economy”, staunch defender of Israel’s more religious and working-class voters against the liberal elites.
Critics say he is self-serving, putting his own future before what is best for the country by refusing to step down despite years of scandal and corruption trials that would have ended any other politician’s career.
In the aftermath of the Hamas massacres, and the new war in the Gaza Strip, it seems most of Israel now falls into the latter camp. Amid an unusual surge of unity in a deeply polarised country as Israelis gather behind the war effort, a new political mantra is bringing Israel together: Netanyahu must go.
“Enough is enough,” said Yuri Elkhazov, 55, also from Ofakim, who sheltered with his family for 17 hours behind the kitchen counter as Hamas rampaged outside. “We need leaders we can trust to keep us safe.”
The prime minister’s polling numbers since war broke out are abysmal, and getting worse - even among core Likud voters - largely driven by his refusal to apologise for security and intelligence mistakes on his watch.
Survey results by the Israel Democracy Institute, a Jerusalem-based thinktank, found that just 7% of those polled trust Netanyahu to prosecute the war. His support has fallen to an overall 3.9 out of 10, according to research by Reichman University’s Institute for Liberty and Responsibility.
“There are two balanced scenarios here,” said Dahlia Scheindlin, a political strategist and policy fellow at the Century Foundation. “The first is Bibi’s polling numbers, which are bad, and continue to get worse. It does not seem he will recover in terms of public opinion, and as for his legacy … this is a stain that will mark his 30-year-career.
“But he has recovered in the past from other stuff no other prime minister could recover from. There’s the possibility that, if Israel is seen to be winning this war, Bibi’s ratings could theoretically go back up.”
Members of Likud have given anonymous interviews in which they suggest the prime minister’s days in office are numbered. Internationally, the White House denied a report that Joe Biden had said the same thing to his Israeli counterpart during the US president’s visit last month - if true, a damning indictment of Netanyahu’s fitness for the job from Israel’s closest ally.
But a no-confidence vote would have to come from within his coalition of far-right and ultra-Orthodox parties. It is unlikely to happen in the middle of a war.
While the country has rallied behind the flag, and broadly supports the war in Gaza, it is unclear how many casualties the public will tolerate, with 28 soldiers already killed in the week-old ground offensive. The growing death toll is likely to be more akin to losses suffered in the Israeli war of independence in 1948, or the surprise Yom Kippur war launched by Egypt and Syria 50 years ago, than the conflicts fought against Hamas over the past two decades.
“Two people in my unit were killed in Gaza already,” said 24-year-old Jacob Bussman, a platoon commander reservist stationed in Ofakim. The start-up owner had just finished his compulsory military service when the war broke out, flying back from visiting family in Germany in order to volunteer. “I don’t know what will happen next, but I do know that I’ve never seen Israel so united before.”
Netanyahu’s future is tied to whether the war eradicates Hamas from Gaza, said Scheindlin. “What we don’t understand yet are the deeper questions Israelis are asking themselves; what are the capabilities of our security and intelligence services, what is the sustainability of our approach to the Palestinians,” she said.
“Netanyahu is just the tip of the iceberg, and underneath there are fundamental questions we need answers to about the future of the Israeli state.”
