The confidant spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss Livni’s plans.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.

JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel was gripped by election fever Monday, with new ballotting expected as early as the summer and polls suggesting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stands a good chance of re-election — largely because of a divided opposition.

Israeli elections generally come down to a race between a conservative bloc — led by Netanyahu’s Likud Party and backed by religious parties — against a more dovish bloc. The story of this election could turn out to be the divisions in the opposition center-left bloc, where three different parties — two of them led by former journalists — plausibly contend for the top position.

“The left doesn’t have a leader — that’s the problem,” said political analyst Hanan Kristal. “They don’t have anyone that can go up against” Netanyahu.

The prime minister unleashed the furor by leaking to media on Sunday that he was considering early elections even though his term can last through late 2013. It quickly became apparent that his hand is being forced by serious disagreements between secular and religious coalition partners over the proposed drafting of Jewish seminary students.

The official side of the process was then suspended Monday morning by the death of Netanyahu’s 102-year-old father Ben-Zion, ushering in a weeklong mourning period for the premier.

Yet the looming election dominated the national discussion, the proceedings lent urgency by a sense that decision time is nearing on a panoply of major issues — from whether to attack Iran’s nuclear program and peace with the Palestinians to the corrosive internal debate over the role of religion in the Jewish state.

“The political system is irreversibly boiling over on many topics … so all the big issues are on our doorstep for the election,” said Yitzhak Herzog, one of the leaders of the opposition Labor Party.

The center-left had long been led by Labor. But in the past two elections, the Kadima Party founded in 2005 by former premier Ariel Sharon achieved primacy. Now both claim the bloc leadership, and a third party — headed by TV anchor Yair Lapid — also appears to be a significant force.

A poll published Monday by the Dahaf institute showed the two blocs about evenly matched — with the right winning 61 out of 120 Knesset seats, substantially less than the majority it won in 2009. The poll of 500 people had a four-seat margin of error.

But whereas Likud dominated the right with 30 seats, the picture on the left was far more complex: Labor came out on top with 18, while Kadima, the current top party in the bloc, had 11 — tied with Lapid’s Yesh Atid (There is a Future), which currently exists mainly on paper.

The poll was similar to other recent surveys. It also showed results changing based on different scenarios of politicians combining forces.

Kristal, the analyst, said that Shelly Yachomovich, the former radio newswoman who won Labor’s leadership primary several months ago, is not seen by most of the public as a credible candidate for prime minister. Kadima’s Shaul Mofaz, a former military chief and defense minister, is much more in the traditional mold of Israeli leaders — yet his party seems to be falling behind.

“Whoever doesn’t want a right-wing prime minister must vote for Shaul Mofaz,” Tsachi Hanegbi, a top Kadima figure, told Israel Radio.

Netanyahu is expected to consult with coalition partners after the mourning period ends, next week. Several religious lawmakers said Monday that the religious parties in his coalition would prefer elections in October. Others have called for the balloting to be held as early as August to minimize the period of uncertainty.

The political developments followed an unusual episode in which Netanyahu came under blistering attack over the weekend from Yuval Diskin, former head of the Shin Bet internal security agency. Diskin criticized Netanyahu’s threats to attack Iran and inactivity on the Palestinian front, saying he had “no faith” in the country’s political leadership.

Adding to Netanyahu’s headaches are two Supreme Court decisions that threaten his coalition.

In one, the court ordered the government to dismantle by July 15 an illegal West Bank settlement outpost — a move that faces tough opposition from hard-line coalition allies.

Netanyahu also faces a Supreme Court-ordered Aug. 1 deadline to scrap draft exemptions for tens of thousands of religious seminary students — a prospect certain to spark strenuous opposition from the religious parties on which his majority depends. If he tries to extend the exemptions, trouble looms with his powerful foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman of the secular Yisrael Beitenu party.

That situation — a legal and political cul-de-sac — has led some to predict that even if Netanyahu’s bloc retains its majority he will prefer to establish a centrist coalition with some of the more dovish parties over a renewed alliance with the religious groups.

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Follow AP Jerusalem bureau chief Dan Perry at: www.twitter.com/perry(underscore)dan

Ian Deitch contributed to this report.

Now he faces a May 1 deadline by the Israeli Supreme Court to destroy the houses. The future of the 30 apartments built north of Jerusalem have become a test of whether he can continue this balancing act.

The Israeli leader wants the court to defer the deadline to give officials time to save the five apartment buildings in the Ulpana outpost, built without official authorization on the fringes of the religious Beit El settlement.

“We are looking for ways to prevent the demolition of the houses,” Netanyahu told Israel Radio.

The buildings were ordered demolished because they were erected on privately owned Palestinian land, something the court outlawed decades ago, even as it authorized building on other West Bank territory. A 2005 government report also found Ulpana was erected without following proper government procedures.

The battle over the settlements is at the heart of the current impasse in peace efforts.

The Palestinians say there is no point negotiating with Israel if it continues to expand settlements in the occupied West Bank and east Jerusalem, areas they claim for their future state. A string of Israeli governments have pledged not to build any new settlements. But Palestinians accuse the settler movement, with tacit government support, of using outposts to grab more land.

With more than 500,000 Jewish settlers now living in these areas, captured by Israel in the 1967 Mideast war, the Palestinians say their dream of an independent state is quickly fading as it grows more difficult to partition the land between Israelis and Palestinians. They refuse to resume peace talks without a settlement freeze. The international community also views settlements as illegitimate.

Netanyahu, whose government is dominated by parties sympathetic to the settlers, says negotiations should begin without conditions. Talks have been stalled for three years because of the settlement dispute.

The prime minister opposes any division of Jerusalem, and in a speech on Israel’s Memorial Day, reiterated Israel’s claim to all of the city. “We will not move from here. We will not stop building,” he said.

For Netanyahu’s hardline allies, Ulpana has become a rallying cry for the larger issue of their right to build settlements. A succession of ministers and lawmakers from Netanyahu’s coalition has made pilgrimages to Ulpana in recent days, and hundreds of senior officials from Netanyahu’s Likud Party turned up for a solidarity rally.

“We said we wouldn’t evacuate the neighborhood,” Vice Prime Minister Moshe Yaalon said Saturday. “Should this happen, the government will fall.”

Netanyahu himself has been a longtime ally of the settlers. But under heavy international pressure, he has endorsed the concept of a Palestinian state. Netanyahu even borrowed a line from his dovish opponents recently, warning that if there is no peace, Israel would in effect be forced to absorb millions of Palestinians and destroy the Jewish character of his country.

Netanyahu, who has presided over a remarkably stable coalition of six parties, spoke for the first time Tuesday of the possibility of moving up elections from their scheduled date of October 2013.

Settlers who live at Ulpana insist the land was purchased legally from its Palestinian owners, something the court disputes. Like many other enclaves built in defiance of official procedures, Ulpana was built in memory of Israelis killed in a Palestinian attack.

Ulpana resident Sarit Ovadiah said she does not want to contemplate the possibility her family will be expelled and their home destroyed.

“What we’re occupied with now is saving the neighborhood. We’re bolstered by our faith. The Lord gave us this land,” said Ovadiah, who has lived in the outpost for four years with husband and daughter.

Ulpana spokesman Harel Cohen predicted the buildings would not be razed, saying Netanyahu would not let his government fall.

The Muslim call to prayer from nearby Palestinian villages floated over the air as he spoke, dramatizing the conflicting claims to lands at the core of the Palestinians’ struggle for statehood.

It’s not clear if the court will grant Netanyahu’s delay request.

Last month, the court rejected the state’s request to postpone dismantling Migron, a large West Bank settlement also built on private Palestinian land without government approval. It must be destroyed by Aug. 1.

Netanyahu got further into trouble with settlers earlier this month after police evicted dozens of settlers from a building they illegally occupied in the West Bank city of Hebron, a frequent flashpoint of violence between Jews and Palestinians.

Shortly before security forces kicked these settlers out, Netanyahu promised to find a solution to Ulpana and to “formalize the standing” of three other settler enclaves built in defiance of official procedures. Late Monday, the government legalized these outposts.

Palestinian condemnation came swiftly.

“Netanyahu is pushing things into deadlock once again,” said senior Palestinian official Nabil Abu Rdeneh.

Hebron settler leaders said about 10 settler families entered the house before dawn on Thursday after legally purchasing it from a Palestinian landowner.

A spokesman for the settlers inside the house, Shlomo Levinger, said they moved in the dead of night because they had received information that the Palestinian Authority had learned of the purchase and planned to take over the building.

Military spokesman Guy Inbar said the settlers were ordered to leave the building by Tuesday afternoon, because the house was occupied without the military’s authorization, or be forcibly removed. He said the military was still determining whether the purchase was legitimate.

Hebron settler leader David Wilder said the decision was political and insisted the purchase was legitimate.

“There are people who don’t want to see Jews living in Hebron,” Wilder said. “We are going to do everything we can to see this order is annulled.”

He would not say what steps settlers planned to take, but put the blame for the expulsion order on Defense Minister Ehud Barak.

On Monday, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman announced Israel was severing working ties with the council.

“It means that we’re not going to work with them. We’re not going to let them carry out any kind of mission for the Human Rights Council, including this probe,” said Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor.

Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Malki said he was not surprised by the Israeli move.

“Israel never cooperated with all fact finding missions that were sent and established by the U.N. to investigate the Israeli atrocities against the Palestinians,” he said after meeting his Danish counterpart in Copenhagen.

Much of the international community sees settlement construction on occupied lands the Palestinians seek for a future state as a major impediment to peacemaking, and has pressured Israel to freeze it.

Israel has moved 500,000 Israelis to the West Bank and east Jerusalem since capturing the areas, along with Gaza, in the 1967 Mideast war. Israel withdrew soldiers and settlers from Gaza in 2005, though it still controls access by air, sea and land, except for a crossing between Gaza and Egypt.

The Palestinians say continued settlement expansion pre-empts the outcome of negotiations. Israel, which refuses to halt construction, says the fate of settlements and the related issue of the final borders of a Jewish and a Palestinian state must be determined through negotiations, not demands.

Since its creation in 2006, the Geneva-based council has focused heavily on alleged abuses by Israel. After the United States joined in 2009, the council has increasingly addressed human rights problems in other countries. Last year, it created a special investigator for Iran, held emergency meetings on Libya and Syria and dispatched teams of experts to probe abuses in those countries.

On the same day it called for an investigation of the settlements, the council approved four other resolutions critical of Israel.

The council will likely keep passing resolutions on Israel while the occupation of Palestinian land continues, its president, Uruguayan diplomat Laura Dupuy Lasserre, said last week.

Israel has had uneasy relations with the U.N. for decades, in large part because of the pro-Palestinian majority in the General Assembly, though the United States has used its veto power multiple times to block anti-Israel resolutions in the Security Council. Israel halted its marginal funding to UNESCO in the fall after the U.N. cultural agency recognized Palestine as a member.

Relations with the U.N. were especially acrimonious over a U.N.-commissioned report by South African jurist Richard Goldstone on Israel’s military offensive in Gaza three years ago, aimed at stopping daily rocket attacks. Israel refused to cooperate with Goldstone’s team, though it didn’t bar it from entering.

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Associated Press writers Frank Jordans in Geneva and Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen contributed reporting.

Israel’s leaders have been charging in no uncertain terms for years that Iran is trying to build nuclear weapons. Though officials say they accept the more nuanced American view, they warn that it is just a matter of semantics, because an Iran on the verge of being able to build a bomb would still be a danger.

The United States is playing up its assessment that Iran has not made its final decision in a public campaign to persuade Israel to call off any attack plan and allow the increasingly harsh sanctions against Iran time to persuade Tehran to back down.

The concern — which is widely shared in Israel as part of a complex calculation — is of an Iranian retaliation that might spark regional conflict and send oil prices soaring, at a time when the world economy is already struggling and U.S. presidential elections loom.

Also in the equation are concerns about the ability of the Israeli home front to withstand a sustained barrage of Iranian missiles fired in retaliation. Iranian surrogates Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip could also bombard Israel with thousands of rockets, and U.S. troops in the Gulf region could also become targets.

Several senior Israeli officials who spoke in recent days to The Associated Press said Israel has come around to the U.S. view that no final decision to build a bomb has been made by Iran. The officials, who are privy to intelligence and to the discussion about the Iranian program, said this is the prevailing view in the intelligence community, but there are also questions about whether Tehran might be hiding specific bomb making operations.

The concern, they said, is about allowing the Iranian program to reach the point where there is enough enriched weapons grade material that a bomb could quickly be assembled, within a year.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday, “Iran, whose leader foments terrorism and violence around the globe and calls for our destruction … this regime must never be allowed to have nuclear weapons.”

Israel officials have said that with Iran moving its installations underground, Israel’s level of bunker-busting capability leaves it with a window of no more than several months to act effectively. The United States, with more powerful bombs, would have a much longer period — but leaders here are loathe to be entirely dependent on U.S. determination on the issue.

The suspicion in Israel is that the Iranians have held off on a decision in order to deny Israel — and other countries — the pretext for an attack, officials said, noting that to a certain extent the matter is semantic and therefore secondary.

All the officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the subject is deemed too delicate to be discussed on the record, and the government has ordered silence.

Israel views Iran as a threat to its survival and, like the West, sees Tehran’s ramped-up enrichment of uranium, a key element of bomb making, as undercutting its claims that its nuclear program is purely civilian. The U.N. nuclear agency cited its concerns about Iran’s ultimate designs in reports, but notes its inspectors have found no direct evidence that Iran is moving toward an atomic weapon.

Netanyahu ratcheted up the tough talk this month, emphasizing during a White House visit and in a high-profile speech at home that Israel was prepared to act alone if necessary, even over U.S. objections.

In advance of Netanyahu’s White House visit and during a speech to a powerful pro-Israel lobby, President Barack Obama took an increasingly assertive tone about U.S. refusal to tolerate a nuclear Iran and willingness to block that militarily.

Still, he tempered this tone by saying there was “too much loose talk of war” and emphasized his preference for diplomacy and sanctions. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton reiterated shortly before Netanyahu arrived in Washington the prevailing U.S. view that Tehran has not decided to produce weapons.

Iran reported in February that it possesses up to 100 kilograms of uranium enriched to 20 percent, which would be enough for four bombs if further processed. Uranium must be enriched to 90 percent to be military grade.

Israeli intelligence officials, like other intelligence agencies worldwide, estimate that once a decision to build a bomb is reached, it would take months to upgrade the enrichment and months more to build a crude bomb — in all, a year to 18 months.

Then, to fit a bomb to a Shahab-3 missile capable of striking Israel would take Iran two years, Israeli defense officials say.

Israeli officials who favor a strike do not want Iran even to reach the point where work on a bomb could begin.

Israeli leaders have invoked the Nazi Holocaust of World War II, when 6 million Jews were killed, in their warnings about Iran, citing its nuclear program, repeated references to Israel’s destruction, support for anti-Israel militants on the southern and northern borders and development of missiles capable of being fitted with nuclear warheads.

There is also fear of an Iranian bomb sparking a nuclear arms race across an already volatile region with an active illicit, cross-border weapons trade.

Israel itself is widely believe to have an arsenal of nuclear weapons, though it has a policy of neither confirming nor denying that.

Israel has been warning of an Iranian nuclear threat since the 1990s and has been working on a possible military strike for years.

Leaders here have welcomed the increased sanctions on Iranian oil exports and banks, but they remain skeptical of an Iranian climbdown, especially because Russia and China refuse to join the effort.