The BBC reports that outgoing Prime Minister Yair Lapid has congratulated Benjamin Netanyahu on his victory in Tuesday’s general election. Mr Lapid said he had called his rival to wish him luck and tell him he would ensure an orderly transition of power. Mr Netanyahu’s Likud party and its far-right and religious allies won 64 of the 120 seats in parliament, according to final results released on Thursday. The Guardian adds an article on left-wing parties’ results, saying Israel’s left wing, already small, has suffered the most at the expense of Netanyahu’s win. Meretz appears to have just missed the electoral threshold of 3.25%, meaning its voice will be out of the next Knesset altogether.

The Telegraph focuses on Netanyahu’s return to power, saying the revival in his political fortunes could have serious geopolitical implications, especially in relation to the Ukraine conflict. One of Netanyahu’s more notable achievements, for example, during his last stint in office – when he became the longest-serving prime minister in the country’s history – was the strong accord he forged with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Spectator also reports on Netanyahu himself, saying his return could be bad for Israel. Netanyahu clung on to the pulpit within Likud, the party he leads, with his famous pugnacity and tenaciousness. He saw conspiracies against him everywhere. He made new friends in the far-right of his country; those friends have come in handy. He published a memoir and kept up a ferocious pace of appearances on American television. In many ways, Netanyahu never stopped acting like Israel’s prime minister, even as he served as the leader of the opposition. He had the same focus, at least when he spoke to American audiences, about the nefariousness of Iran, its leaders, its plans for a nuclear bomb. The Guardian adds that Netanyahu’s success is mostly thanks to the Religious Zionists, formerly three fringe extremist parties that he persuaded to merge into one slate before the 2021 election. In doing so, he may have opened Pandora’s box. The Economist releases a podcast on Netanyahu’s return to power and assesses the populism in his politics.

The Financial Times and the Economist report on Itamar Ben Gvir, with The FT saying he is an openly anti-Arab ultranationalist who has in the past been convicted of incitement to racism. Two years ago, Ben-Gvir was a fringe player, his extremist party unable to win sufficient votes to pass the threshold required to secure seats in the Knesset. But today, the Religious Zionism grouping he leads with Bezalel Smotrich, another far-right politician, is the third largest party there and a major force in a coalition led by Netanyahu’s Likud party. The Telegraph adds that he is somewhat reminiscent of French hard-Right opposition leader Marine Le Pen, whose success in casting off her far-Right stigma was partly achieved by posing with cuddly cats in campaign material. The Guardian adds that Ben Gvir in power will cause friction with US Democrats.

The BBC, POLITICO, City AM and the Daily Mail have published pieces on the Government u-turning on Liz Truss’s announcement that the UK would move its embassy to Jerusalem. The spokesperson of new PM Rishi Sunak said the idea “had been looked at” but the embassy would not be moving. A move would have been contentious, with the Palestinians previously calling Ms Truss’s proposal a “blatant violation of international law”.

The Guardian reports that members of Congress have asked the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, to demand Israel ends “discriminatory” travel restrictions against Palestinian Americans visiting their families in the occupied territories and US citizens critical of Israeli government policies.

The Guardian also publishes a piece focusing on Palestinians and the election, saying that for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza the Israeli elections have not been at the forefront of political discussion, as they continue to resist and fight for their survival on ever-shrinking territory. For them, it’s simply a matter of changing the prison guards – because across the Israeli parties, support for the continued oppression of Palestinians and the colonisation of Palestine is a uniting feature.

The Guardian also reports on StandWithUs placing a half-page advertisement in the Weekend Australian on Saturday saying: “Jerusalem was already the capital of the Jewish people when Rome did not exist, the Mayan city of Chichen Itza did not exist [and] Australia’s only inhabitants were the Indigenous people on the land.”

The Telegraph and The BBC has published pieces on the NUS President, Shaima Dallali, being sacked over antisemitism claims. Dallali had previously said “Khaybar Khaybar O Jews… Muhammad’s army will return Gaza” – a reference to a 628 massacre. She also labelled a cleric critical of Hamas a ‘dirty Zionist’, failed to commit to the IHRA definition of antisemitism and in a 2018 article, she praised Muslim Brotherhood cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi – who was expelled from Britain, America, France and Germany – calling him the “moral compass for the Muslim community at large”. The Guardian adds that she will fight the proposal, citing Islamophobia, and is being supported in her legal challenge by Carter Ruck.

Apart from elections, the Israeli media is focused on events in the West Bank and Gaza. Two Palestinians, including a member of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror group, were killed Thursday afternoon during an Israeli military operation in the West Bank city of Jenin. One of the men, Farouk Salameh was identified by Palestinian Islamic Jihad as a “commander”. The IDF and Border Police said Salameh was involved in the killing of a veteran police commando earlier this year. The second killed Palestinian was named by the PA Health Ministry as 14-year-old Muhammad Khalouf.

Kan Radio reports that the Air Force attacked the Gaza Strip in retaliation for last night’s rocket fire. The Air Force bombed one of Hamas’s underground rocket production sites in the central Gaza Strip. Hamas officials said that its anti-air defense systems fired at the planes. This was the first time in three months that four rockets were fired from the Gaza Strip. One of the rockets crossed the border into Israeli territory and the Iron Dome intercepted it while the other three fell within the Gaza Strip. Although no one has taken responsibility for the rocket fire, it is believed to have been Islamic Jihad’s retaliation for the assassination of one of its commanders in Jenin by the Border Police. Haaretz brings a statement from the Israeli military that, Israeli “fighter planes attacked an underground military facility in central Gaza, used for the development and manufacture of rockets fired by the Hamas terrorist organization in the Strip. The attack was initiated in response to the launching of a barrage of missiles from the Gaza Strip at Israel on Thursday evening and will hinder the rearmament efforts of the Hamas terrorist organization. The Hamas terror organisation is responsible for what happens inside the Gaza Strip and it will pay the price for any security violations against the State of Israel.”

Kan Radio also reports on the condition of the teenage girl Tamar Aharon from Kiryat Arba who sustained very serious gunshot injuries to her head yesterday. She is said to be in serious but stable condition and her life is not in imminent danger.  The IDF is investigating whether this was a terror attack in which the bullet was aimed directly from a distance of approximately 800 meters or whether the gunman fired on the settlement and the bullet hit the teenager at random. Troops conducted searches in Hebron in an attempt to determine the location from which the bullet was fired.

In Haaretz, Amos Harel writes that “this coalition has one paramount goal: to abort Netanyahu’s slow but so far fairly certain trajectory toward a prison cell. And to put a halt to the legal proceedings, a few quick laws need to be passed. According to every jurist knowledgeable about the matter, because Israel doesn’t have a constitution and there is no requirement for a special majority in the Knesset even for such radical changes, Netanyahu will easily get his way”. Regarding Ben Gvir, Harel adds that “perhaps Netanyahu recalls U.S. President Lyndon Johnson’s famous quip: “It’s probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.” The thing is that Ben-Gvir is more into lighting fires than putting them out Boy Scout style. And in light of the final results (and to change the metaphor), it’s no longer quite clear who is the tiger and who the rider.

Also discussing the election results, Sima Kadmon in Yediot Ahronot asks, in an emotional assessment of the election results, “how can one put into words the feelings of an entire camp that is nearly equal in size to the winner and which felt this week that this is the end of Zionism? That the Zionism it knew, grew up on, believed in, and fought for has been steamrollered? How do you translate into words the feelings of frustration and unease? The sense that a catastrophe of indeterminable boundaries is upon you and that every day these boundaries grow, with unfamiliar new characters as the familiar ones vanish? It’s like watching a pileup: you can’t look away even as your stomach turns at the horror. Israel has had transitions of power before, and there have been objections and misgivings and fears, even serious ones. But it didn’t feel like this, like your sources of water, culture, education and inspiration were being taken away and rechanneled in a completely different direction”.

Taking a different angle, Amihai Attali in Yediot Ahronot writes that this is something that the citizens of Israel have to internalise. Netanyahu will not be here forever, but what will be here forever is the trend that the State of Israel has been headed to for a quarter of a century, and which was highlighted in these elections. Israel is a much more traditional and right-wing country than it was until the mid-1990s. There are several reasons for this, the chief one being demography. Some of my secular friends view the election results as the end of the world. As someone whose family belongs almost entirely to the religious, right-wing camp, I found myself trying to calm them, over and over. Among my parents’ offspring there is one yeshiva headmaster, two officers in lengthy career service, two hilltop youth, two doctors and five female teachers. None of them aspires to take away your individual liberties. None of them dreams of telling you what to do. They are conservative, and don’t count on public transport on the Sabbath or recognition of gay marriage (which the government of change didn’t do either). But they don’t dream of cancelling gay pride parades, closing beaches on the Sabbath, or making criteria for abortions stricter either…So why despair and not view Israel as a multi-hued country?