Its fields lie just 500 metres from the Gaza border, its houses around two kilometres. Tunnels built by Hamas militants were discovered on its farmlands months before last year's war even began.

This kibbutz, like many along Israel's southern border, has felt the terror of constant rocket attacks and the threat of the tunnels more than most. Six months ago it was overrun with Israeli soldiers and tanks, as Israeli forces pounded Gaza from the air, ground and sea for 52 days – the longest of all three of its wars with the Hamas-run enclave.

At the time Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed: "We will not end the mission . . . without neutralising the tunnels, the sole purpose of which is the destruction of our civilians and the killing of our children."

But while his strong words may have played well in some parts of Israel, in many of the worst affected areas the overwhelming feeling was one of betrayal. And it remains so.

Despite the bombardment from Gaza militants and the presence of what Netanyahu dubbed the "terror tunnels", residents say neither the government nor the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) provided any advice or assistance – instead each kibbutz was responsible for deciding whether residents should stay or go.

The IDF was approached for comment on this issue but declined to do so.

"The house was rocking all night," says 58-year-old Pablo Leffler, a farmer and head of the kibbutz's irrigation systems. "We had Israeli planes in the air, tanks driving everywhere, Israeli artillery fired over our heads into Gaza and the rockets coming at us from Gaza."

He and his son, along with two others, stayed to manage the 1000-hectare farm, which grows carrots, radishes, potatoes and peanuts for export to Europe and lies just across the border from the southern Gaza Strip city of Khan Younis.

In the absence of any advice or instruction from the government or the army, the kibbutz sent most of its 300 residents to the safety of kibbutzim in the north.

"People were very angry that the army did not discuss an evacuation program with us or give us any notice of ceasefires, which is a time when Hamas sends everything they've got at us," Leffler says.

It was, he says, "a huge breach of trust felt by many, many people here".

A late surge in the polls from the centre-left alliance of the Labor Party and HaTnuah – known as the Zionist Union – has put Netanyahu's hopes for a fourth term in doubt. The only election posters at the entrance to the kibbutz feature Zionist Union leaders Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni. The slogan? "It's us or them."

Herzog has promised to revamp peace talks with Palestinian representatives - which his election partner Livni led under Netanyahu's last coalition government - although his critics say his support for retaining many of the large settlement blocs in occupied territory erodes the possibility for a Palestinian state in the same way as Netanyahu's policies.

"Even though we are criticised for our stance, we support disengagement with Gaza," Leffler says. "We want the government to talk to Abu Mazen [Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas] and try to revive the peace process to find a solution regarding the Gaza Strip."

The other political priority for the south? The economy, Leffler says without hesitation. "We want the government to stop putting money into the settlements that are built in places that are either not part of the state [of Israel] or in areas that will be returned to the Palestinians in a land swap. This is money they are throwing away that could be invested in the south to alleviate some of the poverty down here."

Dany Kohan, the production manager at the kibbutz's factory, which produces lever arch binders, is the head of the community's emergency committee. He echoes Leffler's criticisms.

"Without a government evacuation plan, I found myself taking decisions on the lives of people as a regular citizen . . . there was a lot of anger here about this," Kohan says. "There is still a lot of anger."

Particularly galling was Israel's boast that it warned Palestinian communities in the Gaza Strip that it was about to launch missile or drone strikes, and yet it gave the southern border communities no such warnings.

"To us they didn't say a word," Kohan says. "I think in our community and all communities along the borderline, Bibi [Netanyahu's nickname] will not draw one vote."

It's always been about the left-wing parties in the kibbutz, he says, but after the war last year that has intensified: "Whenever Bibi talks about Iran, people in the south are thinking about economic issues, not security ones.

"To Herzog I would say: give us some hope, give our children some hope, we cannot live all the time with the feeling that something will go wrong."

'I will only sleep quietly when that threat is removed'

Just over 30 kilometres away in Sderot, another Israeli town that sits along the Gaza border, the political feeling could not be more different. Support is strongly behind Netanyahu's Likud Party and a handful of smaller parties that sit even further to the right.

Situated 2.5 kilometres from the border, Sderot too feels the brunt of attacks from Hamas militants in Gaza. Its police station houses a collection of the remnants of some of the thousands of Qassam rockets that have been fired at the town over the years and its bomb shelters are known for their colourful artwork – an attempt to soften the trauma of a community that has so often been under siege.

"M", as he has asked to be identified, is an officer in the IDF, where he has served for the last 13 years, through all three of Israel's wars with Gaza – Operation Cast Lead from December 2008 to January 2009, Operation Pillar of Defence in November 2012 and for 52 harrowing days last year in Operation Protective Edge.

"It was a tough moment in our lives, there were sirens all the time, we were under stress, but it gave me a lot motivation knowing that my job [in the army] was helping to protect Sderot," M says.

He will be voting for Likud in this week's election. "We trust him, Bibi is the one person who can give us security . . . if Herzog wins it would be catastrophic for our security."

Another Sderot local who wanted to be identified only as Elan, a government employee who served in the IDF in Gaza during the first intifada in the late 1980s and early 1990s, warns that Herzog does not have the necessary experience to deal with the security threats facing Israel. He says even Netanyahu did not hit Hamas strongly enough in last year's war: "Security is our only concern. If Hamas is firing a rocket at us from Gaza, I want the government to react without hesitation."

As for Iran and the possibility it will develop a nuclear weapon – the main issue that Netanyahu has focused on for all three terms of his leadership and the subject of his controversial speech to the US Congress earlier this month – Elan says it could not be more important to his country's future: "I cannot sleep at night because of Iran and the ayatollahs who in every second sentence speak about their desire to destroy Israel . . . I will only sleep quietly when that threat is removed."

But the polls in the last week of this election campaign – an election prompted by Netanyahu when he dissolved his increasingly fractious coalition government last November – indicate that domestic issues such as the cost of living and a deep sense of economic injustice are foremost in voters' minds.

In the final set of polls published on Friday, the country's top-selling newspaper Yediot Aharonot put the Zionist Union four seats in front of Likud, 26 to 22, while the Maariv daily projected it to win by four seats, 25 to 21. Importantly, the Maariv poll found regardless of who wins, 72 per cent believe Israel needs a change in direction.

All the polls showed the Joint List, a newly formed alliance of Israel's main Arab parties, in third place with 13 seats, with the centrist Yesh Atid ["There is a Future"] and the far-right HaBayit HaYehudi ["Jewish Home"] both expected to win at least 11 seats in the 120-seat Knesset.

The polling – said to be sending ripples of panic through the Likud camp – appeared to be further dampening Netanyahu's already low-key campaign.

'The situation on the ground is really tough'

It is the last Friday before the March 17 election and Ronen Gabay is hanging Likud banners at the entrance to Sderot. How does he think the campaign is going? "It's tough," the 38-year-old truck driver and Likud volunteer admits. "The situation on the ground is really tough, we are doing badly in the polls."

Gabay says there are no major events planned for the last three days of the campaign in the region – Netanyahu has not made a single appearance in the south and most other election events have been small and tightly controlled. "If Bibi does not win it will be a disaster," he says. "We owe Bibi our security."

Just 800 metres from Gaza, its farmlands touching the border fence, the kibbutz of Nahal Oz suffered more than most during the last war. One of its residents, four-year-old Daniel Tragerman, was killed on August 22 when a rocket fired from Gaza landed outside his home as his family were running for their safety room. It is a death that still haunts the tight-knit border community of 300.

Danny Rachamin, spokesman for the kibbutz and the irrigation manager for its farms, says 17 families left after the war and they have only filled half of those vacancies since. "We are such a small community it felt as if one of our own children had died - until now there is not a day that I do not think about it."

He does not care who forms government – instead he is focused on getting whoever is in power to care about the border communities, to invest in them in the way the current government has invested in settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, which are considered illegal under international law.

As the Islamic call to prayer from Gaza wafts over Nahal Oz, Rachamin says the next prime minister should go to Gaza and give a speech in its parliament, just like Egyptian president Anwar Sadat's speech to the Knesset in 1977.

"It is about our future and the lives of our children - we must do something to change this situation, we must," he insists. "We have nothing to lose."