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Read our special report on security in the spotlight as Israelis prepare to vote

AFP- Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak, who led the Jewish state's most ambitious peace effort with the Palestinians a decade ago, is a former army chief who has reburnished his military credentials for Tuesday's election with a deadly three-week offensive on Gaza.

Three months ago, his centre-left Labour party, which dominated Israeli politics for three decades after its creation in the 1948 Middle East war, had looked set for electoral meltdown, with opinion polls projecting it to win just seven of the Israeli parliament's 120 seats.

But the decision by Israel's most decorated soldier to support a devastating offensive against the Islamist Hamas movement that controls Gaza after months of being the leading champion of a tenuous truce has done wonders to his poll ratings.

It was the second major comeback for the 66-year-old former chief of staff. Barak withdrew from politics altogether after his 1999-2001 premiership during which he tried and failed to make peace with then Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

Back then, Barak offered unpopular concessions on east Jerusalem only to see Arafat spurn the offer and Israeli voters punish him at the polls with a resounding endorsement of right-wing veteran Ariel Sharon.

But this time round, Barak has been trading on military credentials reburnished by the Gaza war, which, while drawing international opprobrium on Israel for the high civilian death toll, was all but universally popular among Israeli Jews.

Barak has been tirelessly telling voters that his general's stars are what the country needs in high government office to keep the Hamas threat at bay in the longer term.

"We delivered a harsh blow to Hamas... and if it emerges that we need to strike it harder, the appropriate moment will come," he said recently.

In a meeting with Russian-speakers last week, he reached back to a quote made famous by Vladimir Putin when he first stood for the Russian presidency in 1999, vowing to hit Chechen "terrorists" wherever they may be.

"As they say in your neck of the woods, whack them in the outhouse," Barak told his audience in heavily accented Russian.

"Some think that I was a good soldier, a good chief of staff and a good defence minister," he said at a recent campaign stop. "They are right and I thank them. But I tell them -- I will also be a good prime minister."

Barak, who as premier oversaw Israel's withdrawal from south Lebanon in 2000 after a two-decade occupation, won back the Labour leadership from Amir Peretz in 2007 after the latter stepped down as defence minister following Israel's disastrous war with the Shiite militants of Hezbollah in Lebanon the previous year.

The Moroccan-born Peretz had overseen a sapping of Labour support in the last parliamentary elections in 2006, with many Jewish voters of European origin plumping instead for the Pensioners' Party, a protest movement that was one of the big winners of the poll.

Barak, who is of European extraction and whose family name at birth was Brog, has set about winning back those defecting voters.

Born in a kibbutz, or pioneering collective farm, that his parents helped found, Barak holds degrees in physics, mathematics and systems analysis. Keen on literature and poetry, he also plays Beethoven sonatas and Schubert's Impromptus on the piano.

His military career was legendary. In one episode he disguised himself as a woman on a commando raid in Lebanon to assassinate three senior Palestinian militants.

He also took part in a commando assault in Tel Aviv in 1972 on a Belgian passenger plane hijacked by Palestinian guerrillas, and in the renowned raid to free Israeli hostages in Entebbe in 1976 which saw the death of Yonatan Netanyahu, brother of Benjamin, the right-wing front-runner to win Tuesday's vote.

Critics say he never really hung up his uniform for the civilian clothes of a politician. As prime minister, he infuriated Labour colleagues by making decisions without consulting them.