JERUSALEM (The Thursday Times) — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party has claimed that Israel’s election was “stolen by Arab parties” and demanded that the police and the Shin Bet security service investigate, as a record Arab vote left both of Israel’s main blocs short of a majority.
In a statement on X on Wednesday, which Netanyahu shared, Likud accused Arab parties of “serious criminal offences” including bribery, threats, violence, forgery and the use of prohibited voter-mobilisation software. It said it had handed “hundreds of testimonies and pieces of evidence” to the police, the Shin Bet and the Central Elections Committee and called for a “thorough investigation”.
“This is a serious blow to Israeli democracy and the voting rights of Israeli citizens,” the party said.
What Likud alleges
Among the claims, according to Israeli media, are thousands of envelopes containing cash and ballot slips for the Islamist party Ra’am, threats and violence against polling-station officials, several voters entering booths together, people voting under more than one identity, and gaps between the number of ballot envelopes and the number of registered voters who cast ballots.
None of the claims has been independently verified, and no evidence that the results were systematically manipulated has been made public. The Central Elections Committee said it had received Likud’s request and was reviewing it as part of the integrity monitoring it runs at every election. Earlier on Wednesday, a committee official told Channel 12 that the fraud claims were baseless, The Times of Israel reported.
Police separately arrested three men from Bedouin communities in the Negev on suspicion of trying to buy votes for Ra’am, seizing envelopes holding tens of thousands of shekels along with ballot slips. A court released one of them, a doctor, over police objections and extended the detention of the other two by five days. All three deny wrongdoing. Ra’am rejected the accusations and called the arrests a politically motivated attempt to suppress Arab turnout.
A record Arab vote
The two Arab-led lists, the Joint List and Ra’am, are projected to win 19 of the Knesset’s 120 seats between them, their best result yet, on the back of a sharp rise in Arab turnout. With most votes counted, Netanyahu’s bloc stands at about 53 seats against about 48 for the opposition bloc led by Gadi Eisenkot, short of the 61 needed to govern. Up to 480,000 “double-envelope” ballots cast by soldiers, police officers and diplomats have still to be counted.
That leaves the Arab parties holding the balance. Netanyahu has said it is “simply forbidden” to govern with them, while Joint List chairman Yousef Jabareen said his party was “ready and prepared to pave the way for the ousting of the Netanyahu government”. “The change comes through Jewish-Arab partnership, a true and equal partnership,” he said.
Read more: how the count stood with two-thirds of votes in, and how the Middle East reacted to the result.
