As Israel heads to the polls in what is being called one of the most consequential elections in the country’s history, more than half a million 18- to 22-year-olds will be eligible to vote for the first time.

For young voters shaped by the recent memory of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack led by Hamas and its aftermath, security is a top priority.

That’s especially true in the southern Israeli city of Sderot, which is less than a mile from the Gaza border, where bloody battles with Hamas played out in 2023, and memorials dot the highway into town.

“We want to feel safe in our country, to feel safe to be in our homes,”said Yuval Arvatz, 20, an Israel Defense Forces soldier who had to evacuate her home on a nearby kibbutz after the attack.

Eating lunch at a cafe in Sderot, Arvatz declined to say who she planned to vote for. 

A vote for “change” could mean any party not currently in government. The leading opposition figure is Gadi Eisenkot, the former head of the IDF, who lost a son in the current war with Hamas and has made security a key pillar of his campaign.

Polls, however, suggest Israel’s youngest voters will likely skew farther right than the general population in Tuesday’s vote, favoring parties currently in the governing coalition.

Tammy Hoffman, a researcher at the Israel Democracy Institute and lecturer at the Kibbutzim College of Education, said that the trend reflects a broader, decades-long shift in Israeli Jewish society.

“It’s not really surprising,” Hoffman said. “This is a generation that experienced every upheaval possible in the last few years.” 

They were in junior high during the COVID-19 pandemic, she said, and remember successive elections and mass protests over [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul. Then came Oct. 7 and the war with Hamas.

Hoffman said those experiences have made the need for a strong leader feel immediate and deeply personal for a generation of voters.

“It’s something that is very existential, it’s not far away,” she said.

For 18-year-old Sderot high school student Giorgia Kassabi, that means supporting National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, a far-right politician who championed a controversial law making hanging the default punishment for Palestinians “convicted of terrorism.” The law faces a Supreme Court challenge.

“I’m going to vote for Ben-Gvir,” Kassabi said through an interpreter, “because I believe he’s the one that fights the terrorists the best.”

The Oct. 7 attack left about 1,200 people dead in Israel, and 251 people were taken hostage.

Netanyahu, who heads the Likud party, has not taken personal responsibility for the security failures that preceded Oct. 7. His leading challenger, Gadi Eisenkot, who founded the Yashar party in September 2025, has promised an official inquiry into those failures.

Oriel Aranbiv, 21, of Sderot, remembers trying to protect his family when Hamas militants arrived in the city.

“We need to choose someone that promises us that that thing will never happen again,” he said. 

He also plans to vote for Eisenkot. He compared another vote for Netanyahu, who’s been in power for nearly two decades, to returning again and again to an abusive ex.

No party is expected to win enough seats to govern alone, meaning coalition negotiations could stretch for weeks or months before Israel, and its youngest voters, know who their next prime minister will be.