He celebrated his 50th birthday with a cake decorated with a noose. He says he plans to surround jailed Palestinians with crocodiles. In videos, he berates foreign activists captured at sea trying to bring aid to Gaza, forced to kneel at his feet with their faces pressed to the ground.
To much of the world and to many Israelis, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the bellicose face of Israel’s far right, is a figure from the fringe of politics, despite over four years in power as police minister in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.
But with an election due next week, polls show a boost in his Jewish Power party’s support, reaching beyond its core of militant settlers in the occupied West Bank, to younger, urban voters who might once have considered him beyond the pale.
According to an opinion poll by Agam Labs at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, not only are Jewish Power supporters younger than the average Israeli voter, but as many as a third of them will be voting for the first time.
“I used to think he was a bit crazy, but then I actually looked at what he was saying, and it all made sense,” said Gavriel Marmon, an 18-year-old student and first-time voter from Beit Shemesh near Jerusalem.
Marmon points to Ben-Gvir’s sponsoring of a law passed in March that makes hanging the default sentence for Palestinians convicted of attacks on Israelis, which Ben-Gvir celebrated with the noose cake and a noose lapel pin. The bill is likely to be struck down by the Israeli courts, in part because it would not apply the same punishment to Jews.
Ben-Gvir is even making inroads in cosmopolitan Tel Aviv, long the bastion of Israeli liberalism. Odelia Kedmi, 41, said his policy to expand permits for Israelis to carry guns had “put air in my lungs”.
“It’s almost like President Trump’s peace through strength,” said Kedmi, whose sister survived the attack by Hamas militants on the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023, that triggered the Gaza war. “But peace through Jewish strength.”
Israel’s October 27 election is the first since the 2023 Hamas-led attacks. Many Israelis blame failures by Netanyahu’s government for the deadliest attacks in Israel’s history, and polls show the prime minister’s own Likud party on course to lose around a third of its 32 seats in the 120-seat Knesset.
Yet it is still too early to say whether Netanyahu’s opponents can finally unseat the most right-wing government in Israel’s history, thanks to a shift of many voters, especially the young, even further to the right.
Opinion polls show both Netanyahu’s bloc and the main Jewish-led opposition parties, led by that of former military chief Gadi Eisenkot, falling short of securing a majority.
But Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power, which in 2022 relied on a joint list with two other far-right groups to be sure of making the threshold to win seats, is now forecast to win eight or more seats standing on its own.
That would put it roughly on par with the rump of the former Labour Party that governed Israel for generations, now known as the Democrats, the only major Jewish-led party that still backs a two-state solution to the Palestinian conflict.
On Israel’s crowded right, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, the governing coalition’s other main far-right figure, has faced wobbles for vacillating over an exemption from military service for religious students, resented by many nationalists.
But Ben-Gvir, staking out the furthest right-wing turf of all, has seen no similar threat to his backers’ enthusiasm. On the campaign trail, he speaks in terms of Jewish pride, and vows more conquest of land he says was promised in the Bible.
“We have returned home after two thousand years of exile and we need to be proud,” Ben-Gvir said to cheers from supporters at a town hall in Tel Aviv this month. “We have to be proud and conquer Gaza, because it’s all ours.”
Ben-Gvir, who declined to comment for this story, was known as a hardline extremist long before Netanyahu brought him into government.
He was convicted in Israel in 2007 of racist incitement and support for a banned terrorist group, for holding up a sign backing Meir Kahane, a slain rabbi jailed in both Israel and the United States for plotting and carrying out violent attacks.
For years Ben-Gvir was known for displaying a photo in his house of Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish gunman who killed 29 Palestinian worshippers in an attack on a Hebron mosque in 1994. He said he would take the portrait down in 2020, in what he called a gesture to deprive a rival right-wing figure of an excuse to exclude his followers from his bloc.
Since taking charge of prisons under Netanyahu, he has boasted of tougher conditions for Palestinians, cutting food to the barest minimum. Many prisoners have since emerged emaciated.
He also drew condemnation after he released a video of himself mocking detained Gaza flotilla activists, forced to kneel with their hands bound following their interception in international waters.
Britain, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Norway added him and Smotrich to their sanctions lists last year for inciting violence in the West Bank. The EU has debated a similar move although it has yet to reach consensus.
The foreign condemnation is a badge of honour for supporters. Jewish Power is unconcerned about Israel’s image in the West, Yishai Fleisher, a Ben-Gvir adviser and settler spokesperson, said at the town hall.
“We might as well first have our region respect us and accept us, and then the rest of the world will understand: Israel is here to stay.”
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during an unannounced visit to Israel on Monday, a person familiar with the matter said, as tensions flare between the US and Iran.
The person did not say what the two men discussed during the meeting, first reported by Axios. The Pentagon declined to comment. The Israeli prime minister’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Hegseth said in a social media post that he had visited US service members in the Central Command area of responsibility, which covers the Middle East, northeast Africa and parts of Asia.
Israel’s Army Radio reported his meeting with Netanyahu took place at an air force base in Israel’s southern desert.
Hegseth’s visit comes amid rising tensions in the Middle East war as tensions flare between the U.S. and Iran over the Strait of Hormuz and as Yemen’s Iran-allied Houthis intensify their attacks on Saudi Arabia.
It also came a day after US President Donald Trump endorsed Netanyahu in next week’s parliamentary election in Israel, the country’s first ballot since the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on southern Israel.
US and Israeli forces launched joint strikes against Iran in late February, setting off the wider Middle East war. Netanyahu told Israeli media this month that he’s not seeking to attack Iran before the October 27 Israeli election. Trump has said he will not attack Iran before US midterm elections in November.
At least eight Palestinians, including four children, were killed in Israeli assaults in different parts of the Gaza Strip over the last two days.
On Monday, October 19, Israeli forces launched drone strikes on north-central Gaza City and the southern city of Khan Younis, killing a Palestinian man and two children.
One day earlier, five Palestinians were killed and several others were injured in Israeli shelling and gunfire across the besieged enclave. This includes two children, who were shot dead by Israeli soldiers in separate attacks.
One of the slain children was identified as 13-year-old Tamer Soboh, who was killed in the northern city of Beit Lahia; the other was Misk al-Dalu, who died after Israeli troops opened fire at tents sheltering displaced people in al-Maghazi refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip.
Meanwhile, mass funerals remain common across Gaza as Palestinians dig through the rubble to recover the remains of their loved ones.
On Sunday, the remains of 75 Palestinians were buried in the Sheikh Radwan Cemetery in Gaza city, the majority of whom were children and women killed in Israeli airstrikes that targeted their homes during the three-year genocide.
While mass killings are underway in the war-ravaged territory, the humanitarian crisis further deteriorates not only because of Israel’s continued blockade and restrictions on the entry of goods and supplies, but also because of measures taken by some organizations concerned with providing aid to the population.
On Monday, the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) announced that it will reduce food assistance in Gaza by around one-third due to shortage of funding. This means that 500,000 people will lose access to critical assistance.
It is worth noting that since the beginning of Israel’s genocidal aggression on Gaza, the WFP provided food assistance for up to 90% of families in the Gaza Strip.
© JIM LO SCALZO/EPA
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi reiterated that his country’s proposal to end the war with the US and to restart nuclear negotiations is “still on the table,” claiming the Iranian conditions are “completely clear” and “unchanging.”
Talking to Iranian state media on the sidelines of the 52nd session of the Council of Foreign Ministers of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) in Baghdad on Sunday, October 18, Araghchi also said that Iran is currently studying the US response to its proposals.
If the US meets its conditions, “the Strait of Hormuz will be reopened on the sixth day, and negotiations will resume on the seventh,” Araghchi said.
Though Araghchi did not talk about them explicitly, he reiterated that the Iranian conditions are the same as what the US had agreed to under the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), signed in June.
On several previous occasions Iran has made clear that if the US lifts its naval blockade, releases Iran’s foreign frozen assets, and ends the war on all fronts in the region, it will allow the Strait of Hormuz to open.
As per the MoU, in the first 60 days after the deal took effect both sides were to initiate negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program. However, the MoU expired in August after hostilities were resumed within weeks of its signing.
The US resumed its military strikes on Iran in July, leading the Iranians to reimpose their blockade in the Strait of Hormuz in response, reversing its decision to open it for navigation as per the MoU.
Tehran had claimed that it presented a plan to reopen the Strait to the US in September, in a brief meeting with its delegation during the annual session of the UN General Assembly. However, US President Donald Trump later declared he had rejected the Iranian proposals.
Araghchi also rejected the repeated threats of new strikes and economic isolation against his country, claiming that Iran will not bow to threats and will defend its strategic and economic interests.
Last week it was reported that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is facing a tough election at home, apart from planning to escalate war against Palestinians in the West Bank, also pressured Trump to resume the military strikes on Iran.
On the same day, Trump claimed that the US may attack some specific targets in Iran in order to disrupt its nuclear program. Media reports also claimed that the US is preparing to use the so-called “mother of all bombs” to again target Iran’s energy and nuclear infrastructure.
This is despite the fact that Trump has repeatedly boasted about “obliterating” Iran’s nuclear program during the joint US and Israeli airstrikes in June 2025.
Reacting to those reports, Araghchi warned both the US and Israel to learn from their mistakes and stay away from Iran to avoid consequences more severe than during the earlier wars.
“Last time you wanted to “finish the job” Iran emerged even stronger. Want to try your luck again? Be our guest. But be careful; we have unfinished jobs too,” Araghchi said in a post on X on Monday.
He claimed that Netanyahu is pressing for a fresh war simply because he wants to stay in power and out of jail over corruption charges he has been facing for years now, without thinking about consequences to Israel or the US.
In a similar reaction, the head of the Iranian armed forces Ali Abdollahi also claimed on Sunday that his country was waiting for their [the US and Israel’s] foolish decision and miscalculation. Any attack by them would invite “a response war more severe, distinct, and devastating than in the past,” Abdollahi claimed.
Abdollahi’s warnings were relayed by several other Iranian officials on Sunday.
It is reported that the US has spent billions of dollars in the last eight months of war on Iran. It has lost most of its military infrastructure in the Gulf countries in Iranian responses, with over a dozen of its soldiers killed and several dozen of its aircraft lost. The US also faced a severe shortage of crucial ammunition due to the war on Iran, forcing it to suspend the strikes midway.
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