This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Israelis have begun voting in a tight election race viewed as a referendum on Benjamin Netanyahu, who hopes to extend his decade-long stretch in power to become the country’s longest-serving prime minister.

Tainted by accusations in three separate corruption cases that he denies and will have to fight if he wins, the 69-year-old energised his ultranationalist rightwing base in recent days, vowing to envelop Israeli sovereignty over Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank and end dreams of a Palestinian state for good.

His main rival, the former army chief Benny Gantz, has sought to capitalise on anxiety over where he accuses Netanyahu of taking the Jewish state: poisonous, divisive politics; a battered judiciary; a leader focused on his own survival. In the run-up to the election, Gantz said Netanyahu was “not the messiah, nor an irreplaceable legend”.

More than 6.3 million people are eligible to vote at polling stations that will close at 10pm (8pm BST) on Tuesday, after which exit polls will be reported. The party with the most seats in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, will be tasked with forming a coalition government.

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Gantz voted in his hometown of Rosh HaAyin, central Israel, alongside his wife, Revital, calling on Israelis to vote and “take responsibility” for their democracy.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Benny Gantz, the Blue and White leader, casts his vote alongside his wife, Revital. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

“Go to vote. Choose whoever you believe in. Respect each other and let us all wake up for a new dawn, a new history,” he said.

Netanyahu cast his ballot shortly after in Jerusalem, alongside his wife Sara, urging all Israelis to vote, saying it was a “sacred act”.

Final opinion polls, released four days ago, showed mixed results. Netanyahu’s Likud party was slightly behind Gantz’s Blue and White, but had a better chance of forming a coalition with allies contending seats with far-right and religious electorates.

Those include Jewish Power, admirers of a deceased militant exploiting anti-Arab sentiment, and Zehut, an ostensibly libertarian party fighting for cannabis legalisation but one that also wants to forcefully take control of religious sites sacred to Jews and Muslims in the Old City of Jerusalem.

In preparation for election day, the military said it had closed all crossings with the West Bank, where more than 2.5 million Palestinians live under Israeli military rule but cannot vote, and Gaza, where 2 million more live under blockade.

Inside Israel, where a fifth of the population is Arab and has the right to vote, there have been calls for an election boycott, a longstanding symbolic protest against the country’s treatment of Palestinians.

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The election has been marred by overtly anti-Arab campaigns waged by major political parties. Last year, Israel passed a law affording Jewish people the “unique” right to self-determination that many Palestinian citizens of Israel said formally acknowledged their status as second-class citizens.

Weeks from election day, Netanyahu exacerbated those fears. “Israel is not a state of all its citizens,” he wrote online. “Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people – and only it.”

Tuesday morning’s Hebrew media framed the election as a referendum on Netanyahu. “Bibi or not Bibi, that is the question” was the headline of an op-ed in the leading Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper.

Its author, Sima Kadmon, wrote a takedown of the prime minister, asking whether Israelis even had the imagination to vote for someone else.

“Have we lost faith in the possibility that things can be different? That this isn’t a decree of fate? That this need not be the reality we live in – the cacophony, the culture of lying, the endless scandals, the incitement and sowing divisions, the reign of power and hedonism?”