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Final opinion polls published before Tuesday's vote showed the ruling Kadima closing the gap on the right-wing opposition Likud to just a few seats, filling the sails of the centrist party that had been trailing in surveys.
With the number of undecided voters around 20 percent -- Israel's highest ever according to polls -- the leaders of Kadima and Likud made last-minute efforts to sway supporters to their camps.
"Victory is within reach," Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, the head of Kadima aiming to become Israel's second woman prime minister, told public radio.
"If Kadima gets just one mandate more than Likud, we will be able to form a governing coalition as we are a centrist party that can bring together the right and the left," she said.
In the complex world of Israeli politics, the person the president will charge with forming a coalition is not automatically the one who gets the most votes, but the one who has the highest chances of cobbling together 61 seats in the 120-member parliament.
Livni is hoping that a strong enough showing in Tuesday's ballot will draw smaller parties to her camp, away from Benjamin Netanyahu, a former premier who heads the right-wing Likud and who looks likely to get the most backing for a coalition.
Netanyahu, who according to local media is worried that the loss of support will mean that he will head a shaky government that will only last a year or so, has sought to brandish his credentials as a security hardliner.
On Monday he toured the Golan Heights, vowing never to cede the territory that Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 Six Day War and unilaterally annexed in 1981 as part of an eventual peace deal with Damascus.
"Anyone who wants me as prime minister needs to vote Likud. Otherwise he'll get Livni and Kadima in power," he told Israeli media.
The last polls gave Likud 25 to 27 seats and Kadima 23 to 25 seats in the Knesset parliament.
Meanwhile red-hot and controversial Avigdor Lieberman basked in the spotlight, with polls predicting his ultra-nationalist Yisrael Beitenu party will get up to 19 seats and become the third-largest in the Knesset, knocking the veteran Labour to its worst-ever showing of fourth place.
"Start getting used to this, and start learning these names," the Maariv daily quoted Lieberman as telling reporters as he pointed to members of his party sharing a stage with him at an election rally in Haifa on Sunday night.
With a surge of backing for the party of the man who has built a reputation on the back of vitriolic attacks on Israel's Arab citizens, Yisrael Beitenu changed its election night headquarters from a small hotel in Tel Aviv to a large one in Jerusalem near a building housing many international media.
Support for Lieberman has swelled in past weeks in the wake of the war in Gaza, as his tough stances on Israeli Arabs and Hamas found fertile ground with voters concerned with security and distrustful of past politicians.
"Lieberman is the scarecrow that panic-stricken Israelis want to place in the political cornfield in the hope that the Arabs are crows: that they will.. take fright," wrote a columnist in the mass-selling Yediot Aharonot.
Lieberman, who in the past has called for execution of Israeli Arab MPs who have had dealings with the Hamas movement pledged to the destruction of the Jewish state, has made "No Citizenship Without Loyalty" a central theme of his campaign.
President Shimon Peres, Israel's veteran statesman and a Nobel peace laureate, told public radio on Monday that "as head of state, I worry about incitement to violence against one part of the electorate. Arabs, like all the citizens of the country, have the same rights and duties as everyone else."
With the number of undecided voters around 20 percent -- Israel's highest ever according to polls -- the leaders of Kadima and Likud made last-minute efforts to sway supporters to their camps.
"Victory is within reach," Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, the head of Kadima aiming to become Israel's second woman prime minister, told public radio.
"If Kadima gets just one mandate more than Likud, we will be able to form a governing coalition as we are a centrist party that can bring together the right and the left," she said.
In the complex world of Israeli politics, the person the president will charge with forming a coalition is not automatically the one who gets the most votes, but the one who has the highest chances of cobbling together 61 seats in the 120-member parliament.
Livni is hoping that a strong enough showing in Tuesday's ballot will draw smaller parties to her camp, away from Benjamin Netanyahu, a former premier who heads the right-wing Likud and who looks likely to get the most backing for a coalition.
Netanyahu, who according to local media is worried that the loss of support will mean that he will head a shaky government that will only last a year or so, has sought to brandish his credentials as a security hardliner.
On Monday he toured the Golan Heights, vowing never to cede the territory that Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 Six Day War and unilaterally annexed in 1981 as part of an eventual peace deal with Damascus.
"Anyone who wants me as prime minister needs to vote Likud. Otherwise he'll get Livni and Kadima in power," he told Israeli media.
The last polls gave Likud 25 to 27 seats and Kadima 23 to 25 seats in the Knesset parliament.
Meanwhile red-hot and controversial Avigdor Lieberman basked in the spotlight, with polls predicting his ultra-nationalist Yisrael Beitenu party will get up to 19 seats and become the third-largest in the Knesset, knocking the veteran Labour to its worst-ever showing of fourth place.
"Start getting used to this, and start learning these names," the Maariv daily quoted Lieberman as telling reporters as he pointed to members of his party sharing a stage with him at an election rally in Haifa on Sunday night.
With a surge of backing for the party of the man who has built a reputation on the back of vitriolic attacks on Israel's Arab citizens, Yisrael Beitenu changed its election night headquarters from a small hotel in Tel Aviv to a large one in Jerusalem near a building housing many international media.
Support for Lieberman has swelled in past weeks in the wake of the war in Gaza, as his tough stances on Israeli Arabs and Hamas found fertile ground with voters concerned with security and distrustful of past politicians.
"Lieberman is the scarecrow that panic-stricken Israelis want to place in the political cornfield in the hope that the Arabs are crows: that they will.. take fright," wrote a columnist in the mass-selling Yediot Aharonot.
Lieberman, who in the past has called for execution of Israeli Arab MPs who have had dealings with the Hamas movement pledged to the destruction of the Jewish state, has made "No Citizenship Without Loyalty" a central theme of his campaign.
President Shimon Peres, Israel's veteran statesman and a Nobel peace laureate, told public radio on Monday that "as head of state, I worry about incitement to violence against one part of the electorate. Arabs, like all the citizens of the country, have the same rights and duties as everyone else."
