Prime Minister Netanyahu, in a televised address Wednesday, gave the first indication that the military debacle suffered by Israel on October 7 could mean the end of his political career.

“The catastrophe will be examined to the fullest and everyone will be answerable for this disaster, including myself,” Mr. Netanyahu declared. “But all this will happen only after the war … and right now, my job is to lead the State of Israel and its people to a crushing victory over its enemies.”

In more than two-and-a-half decades at the forefront of Israeli politics, Mr. Netanyahu has reshaped the Likud party in his own image. Before the Hamas attacks on October 7, he was politically unassailable within Likud, seeing off a series of challengers, none of whom posed a serious political threat.

Mr. Netanyahu’s departure from public life will, whenever it comes, have a tectonic effect on Israeli politics. The scramble to succeed him at the helm of Likud will be fierce and caustic. This post-war reckoning and its political consequences, though, are still some distance off.

The centrist Yesh Atid party leader, Benny Gantz, joined Mr. Netanyahu after October 7 in the formation of a national unity emergency government. Speaking Wednesday to evacuated residents of Israeli border communities, Mr. Gantz said that it may be an entire year before they’ll be allowed to return to their homes along the Gaza border.