Nearly two years after the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023, Israel in August 2025 remained deeply divided over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's management of the Gaza war, the fate of the remaining hostages, the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the country's longer-term political direction.
The divisions cut across several questions that were sometimes treated as one debate but were not identical: whether the war should continue, how much military pressure could help free the hostages, how Israelis understood Palestinian civilian suffering, and whether Netanyahu's coalition partners were reshaping Israeli policy in ways that would outlast the conflict.
Netanyahu continued to argue that Israel had to dismantle Hamas's military and governing capabilities, secure the release of the hostages and prevent Gaza from again posing a security threat. Critics inside Israel increasingly countered that prolonging the campaign could endanger the hostages and deepen both the humanitarian crisis and Israel's diplomatic isolation.
October 7 continued to shape Israeli politics
The Hamas-led assault on southern Israel on October 7, 2023 killed about 1,200 people and resulted in 251 people being taken hostage, according to Israeli figures. The scale of the attack and the failure to prevent it profoundly affected Israeli public opinion and created pressures that remained visible long after the initial military response.
For Netanyahu and his supporters, the attack strengthened the argument that Hamas could not be left with the capacity to repeat such an operation. For many government critics and hostage families, however, the continuing captivity of Israelis became a central reason to seek an agreement that would halt the fighting.
Those competing priorities were particularly visible in August 2025, when Netanyahu's government approved plans to expand operations into Gaza City. Thousands demonstrated in Tel Aviv against the plan, with hostage relatives and other protesters demanding a ceasefire and an agreement for the captives' release.
At the time, roughly 50 hostages remained in Gaza and Israeli assessments indicated that around 20 were believed to be alive. Images released by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad showing emaciated Israeli hostages intensified public anger and fear for those still being held.
Public opinion revealed sharply different perspectives
The divisions were not limited to whether the war should continue. Israeli Jews and Arab citizens of Israel also reported very different attitudes toward Palestinian suffering in Gaza.
A July 27-31, 2025 survey by the Israel Democracy Institute, based on 601 Jewish and 152 Arab adult respondents, found that 78.1% of Jewish respondents believed Israel was making substantial efforts to avoid unnecessary Palestinian suffering despite the constraints of the fighting. Only 22.5% of Arab respondents agreed.
The same survey asked whether respondents were personally troubled by reports of famine and suffering among Palestinians in Gaza. Among Jewish respondents, 79% said they were either "not so troubled" or "not at all troubled." Among Arab respondents, 85.9% said they were either very or somewhat troubled.
The results illustrated a substantial perception gap inside Israel. They did not mean that either population held a single view, but they showed how differently the war and its humanitarian consequences were being understood across communities.
The humanitarian dispute became harder to separate from the war debate
Netanyahu repeatedly rejected accusations that Israel was deliberately starving Gaza. At an August 10, 2025 news conference for international media, he described reports about Israeli responsibility for starvation as part of a campaign of falsehoods and said that Israel was facilitating humanitarian assistance while Hamas was responsible for intentionally starving Israeli hostages.
International humanitarian assessments later provided a different picture of conditions inside Gaza. On August 22, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, the internationally used system for assessing acute food insecurity, said famine conditions had been confirmed with reasonable evidence in Gaza Governorate as of August 15. It estimated that more than half a million people across the Gaza Strip were facing catastrophic conditions characterized by starvation, destitution and death.
Israel disputed the IPC analysis and maintained that available food and aid data did not support the famine determination. The disagreement therefore involved both humanitarian conditions on the ground and disputes over data, methodology, aid distribution, Hamas's role and Israeli restrictions.
The distinction is important: severe hunger had been widely documented before the formal IPC classification, while "Famine" is a specific technical classification requiring defined thresholds.
Hostages became a focal point of opposition to the government's strategy
Hostage Square in Tel Aviv, near the Israeli military headquarters, became the center of a sustained campaign by hostage families and supporters seeking the captives' return.
Pollster and political analyst Dahlia Scheindlin was among commentators who argued that broad sectors of the Israeli public supported ending the war if that was necessary to recover the hostages. Other polls during 2025 similarly showed substantial support for agreements that would exchange hostages and Palestinian prisoners and stop the fighting, though results varied depending on how proposed terms were presented.
Netanyahu argued that military pressure was essential to achieving the release of hostages and preventing Hamas from remaining in power. Families of captives and anti-government protesters frequently argued the opposite: that continued military operations increased the danger to those still held underground.
The argument intensified over the planned Gaza City offensive. Israeli military Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir reportedly warned political leaders about the risks of expanding operations, including dangers to hostages and troops and the prospect of further humanitarian deterioration. The disagreement illustrated that debate over strategy extended beyond the political opposition and into Israel's security establishment.
Netanyahu's coalition added another dimension to the dispute
Netanyahu's governing coalition depended in part on parties led by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, whose positions on Gaza and the occupied West Bank were substantially more expansionist than those of many Israeli centrists.
Both ministers opposed agreements that they believed would leave Hamas intact. They also advocated renewed Jewish settlement in Gaza and encouraged the departure of Palestinians from the territory, positions that were not official Israeli government policy in all their details and that were strongly opposed internationally.
Their leverage over the coalition complicated Netanyahu's political choices. Ending the war under terms unacceptable to those parties risked a coalition crisis, while continuing military operations brought pressure from hostage families, political opponents, parts of the security establishment and foreign governments.
Critics of Netanyahu accused him of allowing political survival to influence wartime decision-making. Netanyahu rejected such accusations and said his decisions were based on Israel's security and the objective of defeating Hamas. Claims about his personal motive therefore remained political allegations rather than established facts.
The conflict also intersected with Netanyahu's legal and political troubles
Netanyahu was already one of Israel's most polarizing leaders before October 7. His government's proposed judicial overhaul had generated months of mass demonstrations during 2023, creating intense political divisions before the Hamas attack temporarily shifted national attention toward the war.
He also remained on trial on corruption charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust arising from three criminal cases. Netanyahu has denied wrongdoing. His trial began in 2020 and continued during the war.
Separately, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu in November 2024, alleging responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity connected with the Gaza conflict. Netanyahu and the Israeli government rejected the allegations and challenged the court's jurisdiction. An ICC warrant is an accusation and judicial order for arrest, not a conviction.
A separate case brought by South Africa against Israel under the Genocide Convention remained before the International Court of Justice. The ICJ issued provisional measures but, at that stage, had not issued a final judgment on whether Israel had committed genocide.
Religious nationalism and tensions over Jerusalem
Another fault line involved religious-nationalist movements that saw the war as part of a wider historical struggle over territory and Jewish sovereignty.
That debate became especially visible at the compound in Jerusalem known to Muslims as the Haram al-Sharif, or Noble Sanctuary, and to Jews as the Temple Mount. The site contains the Al-Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock and is one of the most sensitive religious and political locations in the Middle East.
Under the longstanding status quo, Muslims worship at the compound while non-Muslims may visit under restrictions but are not officially permitted to pray there. Jordan's Islamic Waqf administers the Muslim holy sites, while Israel controls security and access.
On August 3, 2025, during Tisha B'Av, Ben-Gvir said he had prayed at the compound. Netanyahu's office responded that Israel's official policy governing the site had not changed.
Ben-Gvir also used the visit to advocate Israeli control over all of Gaza and the removal of Hamas. His statements highlighted the gap between the nationalist-religious right and Israelis who wanted the government to prioritize a hostage agreement and political settlement.
Two competing visions of Israel
For politicians and activists on Israel's religious-nationalist right, the regional upheaval after October 7 was sometimes described in historic or religious terms: an opportunity to strengthen Israeli sovereignty and permanently change security arrangements created by previous governments.
At the opposite end of the debate, former Knesset speaker Avraham Burg and other government critics described Israeli society as fractured between those who regarded the period as a historic opportunity and those who saw a prolonged, damaging conflict with no adequate political strategy for ending it.
Anti-government demonstrations in Tel Aviv combined several demands that did not always come from the same political constituency: the return of hostages, an end to the Gaza war, Netanyahu's resignation and, among some protesters, greater recognition of Palestinian civilian suffering.
Meanwhile, many Israelis on the political right continued to regard a military defeat of Hamas as essential after the October 7 attack and rejected international criticism that they believed failed to account for Israel's security concerns and the continued captivity of hostages.
These disagreements showed why it was misleading to describe Israeli opinion as simply pro-war or anti-war. Views depended on how Israelis weighed security, hostages, Palestinian civilians, territorial questions, trust in Netanyahu and the lessons they drew from October 7.
Later developments changed the immediate context
Events after the period described above altered important parts of the story without erasing the underlying political divisions.
In October 2025, Israel and Hamas entered a U.S.-brokered ceasefire and hostage-prisoner exchange. The agreement produced an Israeli military pullback from some urban areas and the release of the remaining 20 living Israeli hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners. The return of deceased hostages continued afterward, while major disputes remained over Hamas's disarmament, Israeli military deployment and Gaza's future governance.
The ceasefire did not create a comprehensive Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement, and subsequent violence demonstrated that the underlying conflict remained unresolved.
By September 2026, Netanyahu was still prime minister and campaigning ahead of Israel's scheduled October 27 parliamentary election. His leadership, the failures surrounding October 7, the conduct and aftermath of the Gaza war, relations with Israel's allies and competing visions for the country's future remained central political issues.
What began as a debate over how Israel should respond to an unprecedented security attack had therefore developed into something broader: a struggle over military strategy, accountability, religion and statehood, the treatment of Palestinians, the limits of coalition politics and the future character of Israeli society.
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