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IN THREE MONTHS, 27 October 2026, the people of Israel will go to the polls. Benjamin Netanyahu is behind in every opinion poll, with a return to government looking increasingly unlikely. That may appear to represent hope for Palestine, but all the evidence is that government change, by no means certain, would not lead to any appreciable change in Israel’s policy on Palestine.

As the election comes closer, the fate of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank may be even more perilous than the nearly three years since October 2023. Israel’s increasingly right-wing electorate means those vying to replace Benjamin Netanyahu may compete by offering equally hardline policies.

Opinion polls by Israel’s Democratic Institute and Pew Research show a huge increase in the number of Jewish citizens who profile themselves as right-wing. It was 29% in 1995, the year Yitzak Rabin was assassinated. In 2019, it had reached 46%, and in 2022 it was 62%. A year ago, in 2025, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz published a poll that showed 82% of Israeli Jews favoured the expulsion of all Palestinians from Gaza.

Public opinion on Israel’s conduct is changing among the electorate of its greatest ally and sponsor-in-chief of its genocide, the United States of America. There is clear evidence of layers of public weariness in the US over Israel; unchecked, it will translate into some change in the Capitol Hill mix, but not policy in the short or even medium term.

Beyond that, while the slide in public support is largely about the financial drain, whatever its cause, any future diminution of government support could offer some relief to Palestinians. Such a consideration is not remotely of interest to the current US administration.

In Genocide: Sponsoring the Destruction of Palestine, I set out just how determined Donald Trump and his acolytes are to control the future of Palestine. The ambition is economic for Israel, the US and select Arab states but also financial gain for the Trump family.

Recently, the purpose of Trump’s nonsense ceasefire and what he termed his ‘comprehensive peace plan’ were laid bare. Israel’s colonial ambition and the United States’ sponsorship of its aggression were exposed through the faux ceasefire and peace plan announced by Donald Trump last October. Trump’s promise to the world on 13 October last of a ‘historic dawn of a new Middle East’ was as deliberate a deception as he’s managed before. It took no time to become clear – there is no ceasefire, never mind a peace behind it. Almost 1,300 Palestinians have been killed since; four IDF soldiers were killed in action.

Nothing material has changed, so there was an inevitability to the recent announcement that his grand plan was to be scaled back to a very small pilot project in the south of Gaza.

It happened quietly; the increasingly serious Iran war Trump started, and the World Cup were helpful distractions. Even in the designated area for the ‘pilot’ near Rafah, no substantial works have progressed – Gaza is as Gaza was, the 70-plus million tonnes of rubble it has been reduced to by Israel and the US. Israel’s aggression in the West Bank is also at unprecedented levels.

Meanwhile, at home, those here who lament the passing, however government-emasculated, of the Occupied Territories Bill might think of Palestine’s children. In Gaza, almost 25,000 of them have been slaughtered with more than twice that number injured.

The rest are desperately malnourished; some will die of starvation. Two other facts should startle us: the Scandinavian Journal of Public Health reported the killing of children in Gaza as the leading cause of child mortality globally in 2025. A respected agency, War Child Alliance, estimates that half of Gaza’s children aged five and older are suicidal. Five!

There’s been considerable commentary – though still not enough – on the deliberate targeting of Palestinian medical professionals. Israel has been accused of being determined to prevent those who most need medical care, including children, from receiving it, by deliberately killing those best placed to provide it.

Journalists are in its crosshairs too. The people who can keep an account of the genocide from the barely living carcass of Palestine today are being killed in their hundreds. It is unprecedented. It is deliberate, and it is working.

It is the utterly unconscionable deliberate targeting of children that is most distressing. Palestine’s children in the West Bank are not as threatened, but the oppression is taking its toll. The abandonment of norms by Zionists determined to colonise more of Palestine knows no bounds. It has taken more land and killed more people – 30 per cent of them children – in the West Bank than in the 17 years since 2006.

Even those who are alive are oppressed at every turn. Nothing is sacred, no relief from the tyranny of Israel is possible under this government, and with an election months away, the depth of its oppression will become more intense.

Team Netanyahu is determined to expand its control of ever more Palestinian land and kill more of its people ahead of October’s election. Last week, Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, agreed on a special budget of $400 million (€351.22 million) to advance more settlements in both Gaza and the West Bank. There was no public announcement for fear it would upset the White House, but with Trump focused on Iran, no such concern is required.

With three months ahead of Israel’s parliamentary elections, the worry is that those in power in Israel will become even more aggressive in pursuit of the ambition to erase Palestine from history while those vying to replace them see a different version of the same thing as the only means of winning.

The West – particularly the United States, the EU, Germany and Britain – has a very limited timeframe in which to address that dilemma. It is showing little appetite to get involved, and our hands get bloodier by the day.

Some stand accused of knowingly and actively endangering human life. Most others, like Ireland, have failed to put the interests of human rights ahead of other, less critical, considerations. The Taoiseach and the Tánaiste have called it a genocide. When can we expect them to act accordingly? Words cannot save Palestine and its people.

Fintan Drury is a former RTÉ journalist, broadcaster and businessman. His new book, ‘Genocide: Sponsoring the Destruction of Palestine’ (Merrion Press) is published and available from all bookshops.

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