Five politicians from the opposition, each with ties to Israel's Zionist bloc, formalised a collective non-aggression pact on 26 September, with the arrangement structured around removing Benjamin Netanyahu from the prime ministerial post before voters head to the polls on 27 October.

The meeting took place at the Tel Aviv residence of opposition figure Yair Lapid. Attendees included Naftali Bennett — his political co-runner and head of Beyachad — alongside Gadi Eisenkot, the former military chief of staff now leading the newly formed Yashar party, as well as Yair Golan of the Democrats party and Avigdor Liberman, who chairs Yisrael Beiteinu.

The joint statement released after the extended meeting conveyed that the participants, despite holding varying ideological positions among themselves, were united around a single overarching objective: forming a Zionist, statesmanlike government oriented toward repair and reconstruction — though all but Golan hold broadly right-of-centre views on the country's challenges. Neither major party has put forward a concrete plan for Palestinian statehood, though the Democratic platform treats it as a long-term aspiration without a defined timeline or pathway.

Golan and the other individuals identified in the report take the position that the toll of more than 74,000 Palestinian deaths does not meet the legal definition of genocide, and that the military operations in Gaza fall short of what would be classified as war crimes.

Ahron Bregman, an Israeli analyst and senior teaching fellow at King's College London, noted that none of the prominent opposition figures — including those affiliated with Bennett, Liberman, and Eisenkot, whose parties he placed within the right-wing tradition — had publicly questioned the military campaigns carried out against Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Qatar, and Iran, with scrutiny from those quarters trained instead on the reputational standing those campaigns had affected abroad. Bregman drew a comparison between those figures and Netanyahu, pointing to the absence of corruption allegations against them and their distance from politicians such as National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. He also observed that the question of Palestinian statehood and Palestinian aspirations for self-determination had not been engaged with by those parties — a matter he identified as central to the broader conflict — and concluded that the country's political weight rested firmly toward the right end of the spectrum.

Eisenkot, who led the Israeli military as its chief of staff from 2015 to 2019, is also associated with a military strategy he put forward in 2008 — one that called for targeting civilian infrastructure on a broad scale as a means of applying pressure on armed groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas, an approach critics have described as involving disproportionate force.

Eisenkot entered politics through Benny Gantz's National Unity alliance in 2022 and subsequently took a seat in the war cabinet Netanyahu assembled following the Hamas-led attacks on communities in southern Israel on 7 October 2023. That December, three members of his family lost their lives during operations in Gaza — among them his son Gal, aged 25, alongside two of his nephews. His departure from the war cabinet that month came alongside Gantz, with both men pointing to what they described as Netanyahu's absence of any clear plan for bringing the conflict to a close.

A year later, Eisenkot moved to establish the centrist Yashar party, anchoring its agenda around demands for technocratic governance, a conscription framework extended to include Haredi communities alongside the broader population, and a state-run inquiry — free from political interference — into the intelligence and security failures that preceded the October 7 attacks. That same month, he told audiences that the US-brokered talks with Tehran were taking shape away from the region and outside what he viewed as Israeli priorities, and he also raised objections to American limits placed on Israeli operational latitude in Lebanon.

Eisenkot has indicated that the United Arab List — also known as Ra'am — would not be part of any coalition formed after the election. During a broadcast interview on 26 September, he expressed the view that no Arab party would agree to his terms, which included recognising Israel as a Jewish state.

Announced in April 2026, Beyachad brought together former Prime Ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid under a joint electoral list — the two having shared roughly 18 months in government during 2021–2022, a period sandwiched between Netanyahu-led administrations. Bennett, ranked first at age 54, has consistently pushed for expanding settlements in the West Bank, while Lapid — who established the centrist Yesh Atid party and is now 62 — holds the second spot in the standings. Lapid has described his coalition partner as someone who leans right politically yet maintains personal integrity, though neither figure has placed a two-state solution or Palestinian statehood among their governing priorities.

Questions of tension arose around Ra'am's place in the 2021 governing arrangement, given a pre-election commitment that Bennett would later describe as having been broken by that very deal. Lapid has spoken frequently about how the international community views those military operations, yet his public commentary has not extended to questioning the underlying reasons for them.

In September 2025, Bennett extended praise to the military and intelligence services following an operation in Doha, Qatar, that was directed at senior figures within Hamas. One member of Qatar's security forces lost their life in the incident, with governments and institutions across the region and further afield registering formal objections. The coalition they are pursuing would draw exclusively from Zionist parties, leaving Arab parties no role in any potential governing arrangement.

Founded by Liberman in 1999, Yisrael Beiteinu drew its core support from Russian-speaking immigrants who tended toward right-leaning positions — a political organisation he has continued to head into his late sixties. Joining a government headed by Netanyahu sits outside what he would accept, and the same holds for any arrangement drawing its numbers from ultra-Orthodox parties or resting on votes supplied by Arab factions. A minority government arrangement was not something he expressed willingness to accept.

A comment to the effect that Gaza held no innocent civilians resurfaced in Liberman's public remarks during November 2023, echoing a position he had first put forward in 2018. The following February, a visit to the Karem Abu Salem crossing served as the backdrop for his contention that the Netanyahu-led government was effectively channelling funds to Hamas by permitting only a trickle of humanitarian aid through into Gaza. That same month in 2025, he took issue with Netanyahu over an apology extended to Doha at the behest of the Trump administration, contending that any such gesture of regret was properly owed to the Israeli public rather than to Qatar.

In a March interview with the Jerusalem Post, Liberman described any future operation limited to border manoeuvres or the establishment of a security zone as deeply misguided. Shaiel Ben-Ephraim, an analyst at Atlas Global Strategies, contended that Liberman's placement within the bloc was ill-suited to his actual political positioning, which Ben-Ephraim characterised as rooted primarily in opposition to Netanyahu rather than shared ideological ground. Ben-Ephraim described Liberman as holding a committed following and remaining an active presence in Israeli political life.

Yair Golan leads the Democrats — a left-leaning party that took shape in 2024 when Labor and the secular, social-democratic Meretz joined together. Golan, a 64-year-old who previously served as deputy chief of staff and retired at the rank of major-general, has expressed a willingness to cooperate with Palestinian parties — a stance that sets him apart from other figures within the bloc.

At a news conference in May 2025, Golan stated that a country acting with sound judgment would not target infants, and went on to allege that certain ministers had been openly applauding the withholding of food from children in the territory. Those remarks were later revised following a wave of criticism from within Israel.

During remarks delivered to party members in October, Golan described the killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei as a move that ran counter to what he considered Israel's national interests — a position framed around strategic utility rather than moral objection — while separately expressing backing for the twelve-day military confrontation with Iran that had taken place the previous year. Within that same period, his support for barring Balad party leader Sami Abu Shehadeh from standing, a removal linked to an article about the October 7 attacks, drew public rebukes from the Joint List and several commentators, placing that stance in visible tension with his previously stated openness to working alongside Arab political parties.

Zur, a researcher in Israeli politics based at the University of Essex, contended that any workable coalition government would need to bring in both Golan and Liberman — a pairing whose common ground rests on opposition to Netanyahu, a drive toward greater separation of religion from public life, and resistance to exempting ultra-Orthodox men from compulsory military service.