Israeli Elections
With some 95 percent of the votes counted, right-wing bloc holds a large lead over the left • New Right Moshe Feiglin’s Zehut Party fails to pass minimum threshold • Arab parties win nine total seats, fewer than in 20th Knesset • Haredi parties hold strong.
With some 95 percent of the vote in, the historic Labor Party under chairman Avi Gabbay won only six seats, an all-time low • In 2013, Labor won 15 seats • MK Eitan Cabel: “Labor’s failure is down to Gabbay and Gabbay alone.”
According to one poll, the New Right was hovering between life and death, barely crossing the minimum electoral threshold of four seats.
Despite facing the prospect of criminal indictment, Benjamin Netanyahu has again successfully outmaneuvered his opponents, including three former generals, to cement his fourth consecutive term and fifth overall, which will likely make him Israel’s longest serving prime minister.
“This is an unimaginable achievement,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told jubilant supporters at Likud Party headquarters in Tel Aviv in the early hours of Wednesday morning.
“This is a historic day. More than a million people have chosen hope,” Blue and White Party leader Benny Gantz tells party supporters in Tel Aviv.
Blue and White Party Knesset member Boaz Toporovsky said “all options are on the table” when it comes to the next government, including a unity government with Likud. “We shouldn’t play this game right now. We should celebrate.”
According to Israel’s Channel 12, it has Gantz’s Blue and White leading Netanyahu’s Likud by four seats, 37-33, while a i24NEWS poll also had a large lead for Gantz with 33 seats over 27 projected for Netanyahu.
“We have to save the right. There’s only a few more hours. Go out and vote, otherwise we get a leftist government,” tweeted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Likud.
“I’m hoping that people get out to there and vote, the numbers are not looking in our favor,” said Rachel Broyde, the head of Anglo campaign for the Likud Party.
Sources in Benny Gantz’s party welcome a decision by Israel’s Central Elections Committee to count ballots that had been vandalized; accuses Netanyahu of trying to manipulate elections.
Although the voting results cannot be publicized until 10 p.m. local time, pollsters did tell the press that exit polls reveal low turnout in Israeli-Arab neighborhoods.
