Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and opposition leader Gadi Eisenkot have offered vastly different ideas on how to end the Iran war — as polls are set to open in hours to decide the country’s next leader.
Eisenkot has said he believes economic pressure is currently the best way to defeat Iran, and backs strikes on the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program, but not a return to all-out war.
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Netanyahu, meanwhile, has remained adamant that Israel must wipe out the current regime in Tehran to secure the safety of the Jewish state — going as far as to post an AI-generated image of a nuclear bomb destroying Tel Aviv on Sunday to get his point across.
The prime minister has also reportedly pushed for joint US-Israel strikes on Iran prior to the elections, but Washington has refused to do so yet as President Trump weighs his options, according to CNN.
“Netanyahu really wanted and tried to convince Trump for a joint attack in Iran before the elections, and Trump did not give a green light,” one Israeli source told the outlet.
Netanyahu’s office slammed the report as “fake news,” but the prime minister has been accused of trying to restart the war in hopes of postponing the elections as he faces a tight race against Eisenkot’s opposition coalition.
Eisenkot, a former head of the Israel Defense Forces, believes regime change in Iran is “not an achievable goal,” and he has called for a balance of military strikes and diplomacy to end the war.
He has long criticized the prime minister’s approach to war as poorly planned, with Israel facing three fronts in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran earlier this year.
The former IDF chief said he supports Trump’s policy of “peace through strength,” telling The Post over the weekend that Iran must not be allowed to become “another North Korea.”
Despite favoring war in the past, Eisenkot now says Trump’s economic pressure has a better chance of giving the ruling mullahs “a sense of defeat” than a renewed military campaign.
While Eisenkot backs renewed strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, he appears less hawkish than Netanyahu — who has repeatedly called for all-out war to resume and for the Islamic republic’s citizens to overthrow the government.
“We have another two years of Trump to finish the work in Iran,” Netanyahu wrote on X.
Source : https://nypost.com/2026/10/26/world-news/how-netanyahu-and-challenger-eisenkot-split-on-iran-war/
