Poll: 54% of Israelis support prisoner swap with Hamas

A poll published by the Hebrew newspaper Maariv on Friday showed that 54% of Israelis support a prisoner exchange agreement with Hamas and a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, while 24% reject it, while the rest do not have a specific answer.

According to the poll results, if elections were held today, the opposition National Unity Party, headed by Benny Gantz, would win 23 of the 120 Knesset seats, the Likud Party, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, would win 21 seats, and the right-wing opposition Yisrael Beiteinu Party, headed by Avigdor Lieberman, would win 14 seats.

Yisrael Beiteinu is followed by the Yesh Atid party, headed by opposition leader Yair Lapid, according to the poll conducted by the Lazar Institute (private) and which included a random sample of 502 Israelis and had a margin of error of 4.4%.

For comparison, the Likud party currently has 32 seats, the National Unity party has 12, Yesh Atid has 24 and Yisrael Beiteinu has 6. In total, the parties that support Netanyahu as prime minister have 51 seats, while the parties opposing him have 59 seats and the Arab MKs have 10 seats.

Forming a government in Israel requires obtaining the confidence of at least 61 members of the Knesset (parliament), and there is no possibility of holding elections soon, as Netanyahu has rejected elections in light of the ongoing war on Gaza.

The current government was formed at the end of 2022 following general elections and is supposed to remain for 4 years, according to the law, unless early elections are held. Calls are increasing in Israel for early elections, but the government’s dominance of the Knesset, with 64 members of parliament voting in its favor, prevents the Knesset from being dissolved.

The war waged by Israel on Gaza with American support left more than 128,000 Palestinian martyrs and wounded, most of them children and women, and more than 10,000 missing amid massive destruction and famine that claimed the lives of dozens of children.