JERUSALEM – In a high-stakes political shift reshaping Israel’s electoral landscape ahead of the country’s scheduled October general election, opposition leader Yair Lapid and former prime minister Naftali Bennett announced a formal political merger on Sunday, a move explicitly designed to unseat incumbent prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The new unified bloc will carry the name “Together”, with Bennett set to serve as its head, according to a statement from Bennett’s office. As part of the push to build a broad anti-Netanyahu coalition, Bennett also extended an invitation Sunday to Gadi Eisenkot, leader of the centrist Yashar party, to join the joint electoral list.\n\nLapid, who leads the centrist Yesh Atid party, framed the merger as a critical step to eliminate fragmentation within Israel’s anti-Netanyahu voting bloc. In an official statement, he emphasized that the alliance’s core goal is to “unite the bloc, put an end to internal divisions and focus all efforts on winning the critical upcoming elections.”\n\nThis is not the first collaboration between the two politicians. Lapid and Bennett previously joined forces to form a unity coalition government in June 2021, an administration that ended Netanyahu’s 12-year consecutive tenure in office and made history by including Ra’am, an independent Arab Israeli party, as the first Arab faction to formally join an Israeli governing coalition. That government collapsed in June 2022 when Bennett announced the coalition was no longer politically viable, leading to a short caretaker prime ministership for Lapid and snap elections that brought Netanyahu back to power at the end of 2022. Since the 2022 election, Lapid has served as leader of the parliamentary opposition, while Bennett stepped back from active political life – until this latest announcement.\n\nRecent public opinion polls have identified Bennett as the most electable challenger to Netanyahu in the upcoming October vote, a key factor behind the strategic merger. A onetime senior policy advisor to Netanyahu early in his political career, Bennett has over the years evolved into a fierce critic of his former mentor’s leadership and policy agenda. A right-wing politician known for his longstanding support of Israeli settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank, Bennett’s profile is expected to help the unified bloc draw votes from centrist and right-leaning voters dissatisfied with Netanyahu’s tenure.\n\nNetanyahu, 76, the leader of the right-wing Likud party who has already served more cumulative years as prime minister than any other leader in Israeli history – topping 18 years across multiple stints – has confirmed he will lead the Likud party’s electoral list in the upcoming vote, which is required to be held no later than the end of October.\n\nSeparately, alongside the major political announcement, the Israel Defense Forces confirmed Sunday that one Israeli soldier was killed and six additional service members sustained injuries in a drone attack carried out by the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. This latest fatality pushes the total number of Israeli soldiers killed in ongoing cross-border violence between Israel and Hezbollah to 16. The current escalation of hostilities between the two sides began in early March, amid the broader regional war with Iran.