One month into the war with Iran, the latest public opinion survey by the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) shows that the public is now split over how the war should end. In the opening days of the war, 63% of Israeli adults said the campaign should continue until the Iranian regime falls. Now that number has dropped to just 46%.
A slightly larger share prefers some form of ceasefire – 30% prefer a ceasefire after maximizing damage to Iran’s military capabilities, and 19% want to reach a ceasefire as soon as possible. Beneath those numbers is a sharp political divide: while majorities in both camps initially supported continuing the war until regime change, now that consensus has broken down.
Today, 74% of coalition voters still support continuing until regime change, compared with only 28% of opposition voters. Among opposition voters, 47% prefer ending the war after exhausting military gains, compared with 22% of coalition voters. Only 10% of the public thinks full regime collapse is actually the likely outcome. This is no longer just a difference in hawkishness. It is a difference over what counts as a realistic goal for this war.
A second divide is opening over whether Israelis trust the official account of the war’s military achievements. 77% of coalition voters believe official reports, compared with only 43% of opposition voters. Trust in the IDF spokesperson follows a similar pattern. And yet the IDF still stands above the divide, with high levels of trust across the political spectrum. Trust in the government, however, further reveals the depth of the political divide: 62% of coalition voters trust the government they voted for, compared with only 7% of opposition voters.
This is not simply a story of a public that can no longer take it. On one measure, Israelis actually sound more resigned to endurance than they did at the start. In the opening days of the campaign, 62% thought the home front could cope with war for up to a month at most. Now that figure has fallen to 37%, with 56% saying the home front can hold out for longer than a month.
Expectations drop as war continues
Israelis are learning once again how much they can absorb. But hope for decisive outcomes is fading. Expectations of significant damage to Iran’s nuclear project have fallen from 62% to 48%; expectations of significant damage to the ballistic missile array have fallen from 73% to 58%; and expectations of significant damage to the regime itself have fallen from 69% to 43%. While the public is adapting again to a state of war, the belief that it can deliver on its grander promises is fading.
We have seen this pattern before. In Gaza, the overwhelming post-October 7 support for dismantling Hamas fell from 84% among Jewish Israelis in December 2023 to 67% by March 2024.
By September 2025, only 44% of the public still believed the war’s goals could largely be achieved, and 64% said it was time to end the war. The Lebanon front followed a similar arc: operational successes lifted confidence, but they never resolved the political argument over the desired end state – and Israelis remain split even now on whether Hezbollah can be disarmed. What the INSS data suggests is that prolonged fighting often turns early consensus into a struggle over what counts as success, and whether the price is still justified when victory keeps receding.
The Iran front may end up even more combustible, as Israelis were brought into this war after repeated rounds of fighting in Gaza and Lebanon that have led to prolonged disruptions to daily life, and after a series of fronts that produced real military achievements but lacked the strategic closure many hoped for. Hamas is still in Gaza. Hezbollah has not been disarmed. Iran’s regime is still standing.
This accumulated frustration matters. It suggests that the move from consensus to skepticism may come faster this time. Coalition voters seem to see the absence of decisive results as proof that the campaign must be pushed harder and longer. Opposition voters seem to see a familiar gap between promises and reality as proof that leaders are again selling an endgame they cannot credibly deliver.
The survey data also shows that government policy is no longer background noise and may be actively shaping the war effort itself. 63% of Jewish Israelis say the IDF chief of staff was right to warn that overloading the army with missions across fronts, while refusing to expand the recruitment base to include the Haredi public, could cause the military to “collapse into itself.”
Among opposition voters, 91% agree. Among coalition voters, only 40% do. The point is not only that the public sees inequality or cynicism in government policy. It is that more and more Israelis see those choices as consequential for national security.
Public support is essential in a small country like Israel, where the military is built on reserve service, and public endurance is critical. The trends in public opinion over the past month demonstrate that the government cannot indefinitely wage a war while ignoring what half of the public thinks.
Israel cannot rely solely on military legitimacy while going against military warnings, doing little to rebuild public trust, failing to distribute the burden more fairly, or leveling with the public about what is actually achievable. If that continues, the current Iran war will increasingly be read not as a rare point of national convergence, but as one more front in Israel’s political struggle, and perhaps one more front in the battle over the next election.
The writer is a Neubauer Research Associate at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), and a Ph.D. candidate in international relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.