Tel Aviv  - The Israel Beiteinu (Israel Our Home) party is the surprise package of Tuesday's election, a development due mainly to its leader Avigdor Lieberman.

The belligerent hawk has been riding a wave of rising support since a six-month truce in Gaza collapsed in early November, rocket attacks from the strip at southern Israeli towns and villages resumed, and Israel consequently launched a 22-day offensive in Gaza which ended little more than three weeks ago.

Tel Aviv  - Israel Labour Party leader Ehud Barak is the most decorated soldier in Israel's history, but doesn't look the part.

He is pudgy, speaks with a slight lisp, appears stiff and ill-at- ease when facing the television cameras, is regarded as smug, aloof and even - say his many critics - arrogant.

Faced with this perception of their candidate, Barak's advisors have tried to turn his perceived disadvantages into campaign strengths.

Tel Aviv  - Ten years ago Tzipi Livni was a novice legislator, entering parliament for the first time. Now, three general elections later, she finds herself within grasping distance of the prime minister's chair at the centre of the horseshoe-shaped cabinet table in the centre of the Knesset.

By Israeli standards, it has been a meteoric rise. While her two main opponents in Tuesday's election, Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud

Tel Aviv  - Few people feel neutral about Israeli prime ministerial hopeful and Likud Party leader Benjamin Netanyahu.

His enemies accuse him of being untrustworthy, duplicitous, devious, unscrupulous and of having been an incompetent premier during his 1996 to 1999 tenure.

They point to the fact that while he began his tenure in the prime minister's office with comparisons to John F Kennedy (mainly because of his young age), he ended it abandoned by coalition allies and castigated by just about everyone else.

Tel Aviv  - The upcoming Israeli elections are crucial for the Middle East peace process.

Yet that process, revived little more than one year ago after a seven-year freeze, is hardly on the mind of the average Israeli voter.

With Tuesday's poll scheduled less than one month after Israel ended a ferocious offensive in Gaza, it is security - not the peace process - which is topping the public agenda.

Tel Aviv - It was just three years ago that the Likud crashed as Israel's ruling party, losing more than two thirds of its 38 mandates in the Knesset.

That was shortly after Israel's unilateral pullout from the Gaza Strip. At the time, many Israelis still supported the withdrawal and voted for the new centrist party founded by Ariel Sharon, who had initiated it.