JERUSALEM — Likud’s central committee opened the party’s primary process Sunday morning following last week’s coalition collapse, beginning the formal contest to determine the party’s leadership for the early elections that were called by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on May 9 after the failure of his rescue effort on the ceasefire ratification vote.

The primary opening, conducted at Likud’s Tel Aviv headquarters under heavy security and with senior party officials from across the country in attendance, formally initiates a six-week leadership contest that will conclude at the party’s convention on June 28. The party’s bylaws require that the leadership question be resolved before the general-election campaign begins on July 5, with the election itself scheduled for September 1.

The principal candidates for the Likud leadership are Prime Minister Netanyahu himself, who has confirmed his intention to seek a renewed mandate; former defense minister Yoav Gallant, who has been preparing his candidacy since the ceasefire ratification vote and who launched his formal campaign Saturday evening; and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar, who informed Likud officials Friday afternoon that he would enter the contest. A small number of additional candidates are expected to register through the formal candidate-filing window, which closes May 24.

The primary’s substantive contest is expected to center on three principal questions: the appropriate Israeli posture toward the post-war regional framework, including the inspection regime currently being negotiated in Geneva; the question of accountability for the war’s intelligence and operational failures, particularly the specific question of the responsibility of the prime minister’s office for the pre-war intelligence assessment that proved inadequate; and the question of the post-war coalition framework, including the appropriate relationship between Likud and the religious-Zionist parties that had been central to the prior coalition.

Gallant’s Saturday-evening launch event, held at a Hilton conference center in Herzliya before approximately seven hundred attending Likud members, framed the contest in terms that Israeli political analysts characterized as substantively different from Likud’s recent campaign rhetoric. Gallant emphasized “institutional accountability for the war’s failures” and “a return to professional national-security decision-making structures” as the central elements of his platform, in language several analysts characterized as a direct challenge to the prime minister’s leadership.

Netanyahu’s response to the Gallant launch, delivered in remarks at a private Likud central-committee briefing Sunday morning, was sharply critical of the Gallant framing and emphasized what the prime minister characterized as the “irreplaceable historical role” he had played in defending Israel during the war. The prime minister’s office’s separate Sunday-afternoon statement said the prime minister would conduct “an active and vigorous campaign” through the contest’s duration and would not “accept characterizations of the war’s events that disregard the strategic context.”

Sa’ar, in remarks delivered Sunday afternoon at his campaign launch event in Jerusalem, positioned himself as a “centrist alternative” capable of bridging the substantive distance between the Gallant and Netanyahu positions while preserving the Likud governing tradition. Sa’ar emphasized his foreign-ministry experience during the post-war period as evidence of his capability to manage Israel’s regional posture during a period of “complex and rapid change.”

Opposition leader Yair Lapid, in a Sunday-afternoon statement issued through Yesh Atid’s communications channel, characterized the Likud primary as “an internal contest that will not address the fundamental questions about the war’s failures and about Israel’s post-war direction.” Lapid said his party would conduct its own campaign on the substantive questions of accountability, regional posture, and the framework of Israeli democracy.

Benny Gantz, the National Unity Party leader who had served in the wartime emergency government, said in a Sunday-afternoon statement that his party would conduct its own primary on a “rolling parallel timeline” to the Likud process and that the National Unity Party’s campaign would focus on “the post-war reconstruction agenda and the question of regional integration.” Gantz’s substantive positioning has been characterized by Israeli political analysts as a centrist alternative to the Likud-led coalition framework.

The post-war substantive policy questions that the primary will engage with include Israel’s posture toward the IAEA inspection regime currently being negotiated in Geneva, the framework for the inquiry commission that the wartime government had committed to establishing, and the substantive direction of Israel’s economic-recovery program. The Gallant campaign’s substantive positioning on each of these questions has been characterized as more accommodating to international frameworks than the prime minister’s positioning.

Israeli polling data published Sunday morning by the principal Israeli media organizations showed Likud’s overall support at approximately twenty-two percent of the electorate, substantially below the party’s historical levels and reflecting the immediate post-war popular response. The polling also showed substantial uncertainty about the post-primary Likud leadership configuration, with respondents indicating that the leadership question would influence their support patterns.

The U.S. State Department’s senior Israeli-Palestinian affairs official, contacted Sunday afternoon, said the United States would “engage with the Israeli political process on its own terms” and would not “make public statements that could be characterized as influencing the substantive outcome.” The official noted that the U.S. position on the substantive post-war framework would remain consistent across the Israeli political contest.

The Likud primary’s first major public event will be a debate-format forum scheduled for May 25 in Tel Aviv, with the three principal candidates and any additional registered candidates expected to participate. The forum will be broadcast on Israeli public television.

The contest’s outcome will substantially shape the framework of the September general election and will determine the Israeli political posture during the next stage of the post-war regional negotiations.