Netanyahu’s ruling party has accused Arab politicians of stealing the election after their strong showing at the polls
Israeli police have found no evidence supporting claims by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party that Arab parties rigged Tuesday’s parliamentary election, according to local media.
Police received 48 complaints involving suspected fraud and voter impersonation, around 40% fewer than in the previous election. No investigative or intelligence evidence pointed to widespread fraud, i24NEWS reported on Thursday.
“There’s nothing dramatic,” Major General Boaz Blatt, the head of the police’s Investigations and Intelligence Division, said, according to Kan News.
Israel’s Central Elections Committee said it received around 10,000 reports of suspected electoral irregularities, but around 80% were dismissed as unrelated to election integrity, including false or incorrectly classified complaints. The reports included allegations of photography at polling stations, ballot tampering, and disruptions to voting.
Neither major political bloc secured a parliamentary majority in Israel’s first election since the outbreak of the war with Hamas in Gaza in 2023.
Netanyahu’s bloc was projected to win around 52-53 seats, while the rival bloc led by former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot was expected to secure 48, according to preliminary tallies. A majority of 61 seats in the 120-member Knesset is required to form a government.
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The Arab Joint List alliance and the Islamist Ra’am party were projected to win a combined 19 seats, nearly doubling their previous representation.
Arab citizens make up around 21% of Israel’s population, and their representatives could play a decisive role in coalition negotiations aimed at replacing Netanyahu, who remains caretaker prime minister.
Shortly after the initial results emerged, Likud alleged that Arab parties stole the election through “serious criminal offenses of bribery, threats, violence, forgeries and the use of illegal software to mobilize voters.”
The party said it collected hundreds of testimonies and pieces of evidence of alleged irregularities at polling stations in Arab communities and demanded an investigation by police and the domestic intelligence agency, Shin Bet.
The Arab parties rejected the allegations. Joint List leader Yousef Jabareen accused Likud of attempting to delegitimize Arab voters, dismissing its fraud claims as “the words of losers.” Ra’am also denied wrongdoing, accusing the authorities of politically motivated arrests and attempts to suppress Arab turnout.
In 2021, the Islamist Ra’am party, led by Mansour Abbas, became the first independent Arab party to formally join an Israeli governing coalition, supporting a broad alliance led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid.
The coalition ended Netanyahu’s 12 consecutive years as prime minister but collapsed in 2022, paving the way for his return to power following another election that year.