Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Likud Party, and its coalition partners expressed outrage as the Central Elections Committee (CEC) approved last Tuesday’s election results on Wednesday despite allegations of widespread voter fraud in the Arab sector and amid reports that the attorney general was blocking the Shin Bet’s investigation of Arab Knesset members who may have been involved in the scandal.
“The reports tonight are an earthquake for Israeli democracy,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu posted to X on Tuesday night.
According to media outlets i24, Channel 13 and Israel Hayom, Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) Director David Zini met on Tuesday evening with the chairman of the CEC, Supreme Court Justice Noam Sohlberg, and complained that Israeli Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara was preventing him from properly carrying out the investigation. Specifically, that she was blocking him from investigating Arab party leaders Ahmad Tibi, Mansour Abbas, and Sami Abu Shehadeh, along with one other Knesset member.
Zini also met on Tuesday evening with Netanyahu and Israeli President Isaac Herzog.
Baharav-Miara published an announcement on Tuesday evening defending her position. “In a state of law, it is not possible to interrogate citizens or elected officials without evidence that justifies it. If the Shin Bet or any other party has evidence that justifies an investigation, they are welcome to present it. Anyone who needs to be interrogated will be interrogated, but no people will be interrogated without an evidentiary basis,” she said.
The Shin Bet later denied that it had requested to interrogate Knesset members, only those in their vicinity, according to Israel’s Channel 12 on Wednesday.
The attorney general also complained that the Shin Bet had not transferred materials it collected to a special investigation team established on the recommendation of Sohlberg, in cooperation with the police and State Attorney’s Office, thus delaying the handling of the matter.
The attorney general’s motivations were questioned by the prime minister and his coalition members. Netanyahu accused her of attempting to “cover up and thwart” the investigation.
The allegations of foreign interference were presented by Zini to Sohlberg immediately following the Oct. 27 vote. On Oct. 28, Sohlberg sent a letter to Zini agreeing they should be investigated.
“Serious suspicions have been brought to my attention regarding improper influence on the elections—exerted through funding provided by foreign entities acting against Israeli interests,” Sohlberg wrote Zini. “I am not in a position to attest to the substance of these suspicions. However, given that they concern foreign entities, I believe there is an obligation to investigate them thoroughly, in order to safeguard the integrity of the elections.”
According to reports, foreign states, namely Qatar and Turkey according to some Hebrew-media outlets, provided tens of millions of shekels to influence the Arab-Israeli vote. Few details have been made public and it is not clear how the funds were used. In a separate investigation overseen by the Israel Police, several people were arrested in connection with direct payments to voters.
On Oct. 28, the Likud, in an X post, said it was “transferring to the police, the Shin Bet, and the Central Elections Committee hundreds of testimonies and pieces of evidence regarding election theft in many Arab polling stations—thousands of envelopes with cash and [Arab party] Ra’am voting slips, threats and violence against polling station members, multiple voting behind the curtain, voting under double identities, discrepancies between the number of envelopes and the number of voters, use of prohibited mobilization software, and more.”
However, on Nov. 1, Sohlberg issued a joint video statement, accompanied by Zini, Baharav-Miara and acting director-general of the CEC Dean Livne, in which he said that while the “suspicions are serious ... Our position is that even if the suspicions are substantiated, this would not undermine the integrity of the electoral process ... The results will be published on schedule.”
According to a Channel 12 report published on Wednesday, Zini and Sohlberg agreed during their Tuesday meeting that the election as a whole was carried out in a normal manner. The Shin Bet estimated that only a few thousand potential voters had been affected by improper influence.
The CEC submitted the official election results to Israel’s president at noon on Wednesday. “The Committee examined every complaint and request for review submitted by political parties, candidate lists and members of the public, including all polling stations identified in those submissions,” the CEC said in a morning statement. “The review found no evidence of irregularities that compromised the integrity of the election or affected its results. The official election results will be presented to the President of Israel today and published in accordance with the law.”
On Wednesday morning, Likud MK Amit Halevi announced his immediate resignation from the CEC in protest of Sohlberg’s decision to bring the election results to the president. Halevi said that the suspicions of foreign interference hadn’t been properly examined. “If Knesset members who bought their seats with bribe money are sworn in to the Knesset, the road to Israel’s destruction as a Jewish and democratic state will be open,” he said.
Also that morning, members of the CEC from Netanyahu’s coalition, including Likud, Otzma Yehudit, Shas, Degel HaTorah and others, demanded that the committee be convened immediately to debate the alleged irregularities related to election fraud. They demanded access to all the materials provided to the CEC chairman, noting that according to the Knesset Elections Law, the CEC is the “sole authority” when it comes to election issues, and not the CEC chairman alone.
Gadi Eisenkot, leader of the Yashar Party and the opposition, said on Tuesday that the “Likud and Netanyahu are trying to carry out a pogrom against democracy and the rule of law. They are trying to drag us all into a dangerous constitutional crisis. Sadly, not for the first time. ... At this difficult hour, both politically and security-wise, they are trying to undermine public trust in the election results.”
