Former IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot’s centrist Yashar party would win as many seats as ex-premier Naftali Bennett’s center-right Together alliance with Yesh Atid if elections were held today, the first time the two opposition factions have polled evenly, according to a pair of opinion surveys released Thursday.

According to the survey published by Zman Yisrael, The Times of Israel’s sister site, both Yashar and Together would pick up 21 Knesset seats, trailing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud, which was the largest party in the poll with 24 seats.

Eisenkot, a centrist politician boasting a decades-long military career, has been steadily rising in the polls over the past several months, despite efforts by Bennett and his political partner Yair Lapid to rally the opposition behind their alliance.

One of them is likely to shape up as the main rival to Netanyahu in the upcoming Knesset election.

The next-largest faction was former defense minister Avigdor Liberman’s secularist opposition Yisrael Beytenu party with 10 seats, the same as the Netanyahu-aligned ultra-Orthodox Shas party.

Three parties polled at eight seats: The left-wing Democrats led by Yair Golan, the Haredi United Torah Judaism, and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir’s ultranationalist Otzma Yehudit.

The Islamist Ra’am party and predominantly Arab Hadash-Ta’al were the remaining parties that cleared the electoral threshold in the poll, with five seats apiece.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s far-right Religious........

© The Times of Israel