Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has taken a hit in opinion polls from a judicial overhaul by his hard-right government that has triggered his gravest domestic crisis. Surveys by two main Israeli news broadcasters showed that if an election was held now, the number of seats held by Netanyahu’s governing coalition in the 120-seat Knesset parliament would fall from 64 to 52 or 53. Seats held by the 73-year-old premier’s Likud party would fall from 32 to 28, according to N12 News, and to as low as 25, according to Reshet 13 in the polls published late on Tuesday. On Monday, the nationalist-religious coalition, formed after an election last November, passed legislation to limit some of the Supreme Court’s powers, despite street protests and disapproval from Israel’s strongest ally the United States. It was the first ratification of a bill that is part of changes to the judiciary that Netanyahu casts as necessary to balance powers and stop the Supreme Court over-reaching. Critics say he is threatening Israel’s democratic principles and independence of the courts, possibly with an eye to a corruption case he himself is facing. Netanyahu denies that. The United States has lamented the Knesset vote and urged consensus but offered no hint that Netanyahu’s government could face practical consequences, exposing the limits of President Joe Biden’s influence over the long-serving right-wing leader. In an unprecedented public political backlash, thousands of protesters took to the streets during Monday’s vote, doctors declared a strike on Tuesday, and some army reservists are resisting call-ups. However, the street rallies largely subsided by Wednesday as the Knesset approached a long summer recess from July 30. Lawmakers reconvene in mid-October and Netanyahu has set November as a target for consensus with opposition parties. Israel’s largest labour union the Histadrut, which had tried to mediate a compromise between Netanyahu’s coalition and oppos