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At a polling station in the leafy Abu Tor neighborhood of Jerusalem, a steady stream of voters arrived in the morning to cast their ballots. Many said they were glad to be fulfilling their civic right and duty but that the election held little excitement or much prospect of change.

"The feeling is that what was is what will be," said Yossi, 37, an engineer who said he had voted for the leftist Meretz Party, and who asked to withhold his family name for reasons of privacy.

Noting the lack of enthusiasm Zelig Segal, 79, an artist and another Meretz supporter from the neighborhood, which straddles the predominantly Jewish western side of the city and the contested, Israeli-annexed eastern side where the Palestinian leadership wants to establish the capital of an independent state, said it was still important to vote.

"We live here, not in Switzerland," Mr. Segal said. "We are not here alone."

Polls in recent weeks have consistently predicted a victory for Mr. Netanyahu's ticket, a combination of his conservative Likud Party and the ultranationalist Yisrael Beiteinu. But the polls have also shown the joint ticket declining in strength, from the 42 seats it holds in the current Parliament to perhaps 32 or 35, and losing support to the Jewish Home, a party further to the right that has been revitalized and energized under the leadership of Naftali Bennett, a charismatic first-time candidate.

Hours before the ballots opened, some longtime Likud supporters expressed their frustration with the outgoing Netanyahu government, saying it had not offered a clear path forward for Israel. One said he would still be voting Likud in the same way that he remained loyal to his soccer team. Another said he would not support Likud this time but was still undecided about who to vote for instead.

The parties of the divided center and left failed to forge a united bloc that might have presented a realistic challenge to the current leadership. The Labor Party, projected to win fewer than 20 seats, has said that if it does not win enough support to lead the new government, it will sit in the opposition.

As usual in Israel, where more than 30 parties were competing in a system based on nationwide proportional representation, no single party was expected to win enough seats for a majority in the 120-seat Knesset. If the polls were anywhere close to accurate, a weakened Mr. Netanyahu was likely to face the choice of forming a narrow rightist and religious coalition or a broader one including one or more centrist parties – an option that could subject the prime minister to pressures from either side and lead to instability or paralysis.

"The sense is that there may be another election a year and a half from now," said another Abu Tor voter, Ruthi Ginsburg, 78.

Critical issues on Israel's agenda, such as the peace process with the Palestinians and the question of how to deal with Iran's nuclear program, figured superficially, if at all, in an election campaign that focused mostly on domestic issues, with parties on both the left and right pledging to bring down housing prices, a primary demand of the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who joined the social justice street protests in 2011.

"The campaign did not require people to choose between alternative ideas on important issues. It was all about images and personalities," said Dan Caspi, a professor from the department of communications at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. This election, Mr. Caspi said, would leave "everything open," with the policies of the future government dependent on how the coalition shapes up.

Many Israelis said that the liveliest campaign was run by the Central Elections Committee which led a drive to get apathetic and wavering citizens out to vote, and warning that anybody who did not vote should not be allowed to complain for the next four years.

Though elections are meant to take place every four years, unstable coalitions resulted in five general elections between 1992 and 2009, plus an additional direct ballot for the post of prime minister. Experts said that voter fatigue partly explained the steady drop in participation over the years, from nearly 80 percent in 1990s to less than 65 percent in 2009.

The president of Israel, Shimon Peres, urged citizens to exercise their right to vote.

"Today the state is asking citizens to vote for a free, beautiful, democratic country," Mr. Peres said, after casting his own ballot on Tuesday, a public holiday. "You can hesitate over who to vote for, but don't hesitate to vote."

Nahum Barnea, one of the country's most prominent political columnists, wrote in the Yediot Aharonot newspaper on Tuesday, "One of the reasons for the despondent atmosphere is anxiety about the future. Young people are anxious because of the high price of apartments and the loss of job security; adults are anxious about Israel's isolation in the world and an economic crisis that might wipe out their savings. Everyone is anxious about war."

The pre-election campaigns "failed to provide a calming answer to any of those anxieties," he added. "At the end of the day, when the results are in, there will still be no answer. The sense will be that the story is over. In fact, it will only be beginning."