JERUSALEM — Israel’s Central Elections Committee chairman said on Sunday that last week’s election results will stand, even if claims of foreign interference are later proven, according to Anadolu Agency and other reporting on his statement.
Justice Noam Sohlberg said voting had gone ahead properly and that the results showed the will of the voters. He spoke alongside the head of the Shin Bet security service and the attorney general. Their joint position was that even if the suspicions were proven, that would not undo the integrity of the election or the results as a whole.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party has alleged, without providing evidence, that Qatar funded efforts to raise turnout among Arab voters and that Arab-led parties "stole" the vote. Qatar rejected the allegation and called it a disinformation campaign. Opposition leader Gadi Eisenkot, who leads the Yashar party, said on Sunday that Netanyahu’s effort to discredit the results had "failed" and accused him of running an organized campaign to delegitimize the outcome.
With all votes counted, Netanyahu’s bloc won 53 seats in the 120-member Knesset, compared with 48 for the opposition camp led by Eisenkot and 19 for Arab-led parties. No bloc reached the 61 seats needed to form a government. Likud was the largest single party with 27 seats, followed by Yashar with 21.
The Arab-led parties’ 19 seats are a record, and they now hold the balance. Together, the opposition bloc and the Arab-led parties would have 67 seats, but parties in the opposition are divided over whether to rely on Arab parties’ support to form a government. Netanyahu had said before the election that Likud would not invite Arab parties into its bloc.
Final turnout was 77.9 percent, the highest since 1999, with 5,716,665 ballots cast, according to the elections committee. The committee said the completed tally is still subject to routine checks and small corrections.
The official results are due to be given to President Isaac Herzog on Wednesday, November 4. Herzog will then consult the parties in the Knesset before asking one lawmaker to try to form a government. The new Knesset is due to be sworn in on November 10. Until a coalition is agreed, Israel remains in a political impasse, and the talks in the coming days will decide whether a government can be formed or whether the country faces another election.
Protests were held near the prime minister’s residence in Jerusalem on October 31, with demonstrators calling for a Jewish-Arab coalition government. That call shows the choice now facing the opposition: work with Arab-led parties and try to form a government, or refuse that support and risk leaving Netanyahu in place or sending voters back to the polls.
