Israel’s election committee head seeks foreign-interference inquiry
Shin Bet is investigating whether Arab-led parties received illegal funding from Qatar and Turkey. The agency says the inquiry does not implicate an entire community that voted legally; acting election committee director Dean Livne says there is no basis for allegations of systematic election-integrity violations.
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The head of Israel’s Central Elections Committee asked Shin Bet, the country’s domestic security agency, to investigate “serious suspicions” of foreign interference in the election, the BBC said. The agency is investigating whether Arab-led parties received illegal funding from Qatar and Turkey.
Final results left neither Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc nor opposition leader Gadi Eisenkot’s bloc with a parliamentary majority. That leaves the Arab-led parties as potential partners in an Eisenkot-led government.
Shin Bet clarified that its investigation did not implicate an entire community whose members had voted legally. Acting committee Director General Dean Livne said there was “no basis for allegations of systematic violations of election integrity.”
What the parties allege and deny
The dispute followed Netanyahu’s election-day social media posts describing high Arab turnout as an “emergency” and a “matter of life or death” for the Israeli right. On Thursday, after the committee head’s referral, his Likud party alleged that voters had been bribed to vote for Arab parties and accused those parties of “stealing” the election. Netanyahu and Likud described the alleged interference as an attack on democracy aimed at removing their right-wing government.
Israeli media cited by the BBC said the committee had received a claim that Qatar funded efforts to increase turnout in Arab communities. Qatar’s Foreign Ministry categorically denied that claim, called the allegations “ridiculous and dangerous,” and accused Israeli politicians of conducting a disinformation campaign against Qatar.
The Joint List and Ra’am, the two Arab-led party lists, rejected the allegations, with the Joint List calling them baseless. Balad chairman Sami Abu Shehadeh, who is part of the Joint List, called the allegation a “racist blood libel” and accused the losing side of seeking security-agency intervention to overturn the results.
Eisenkot, who had been briefed on the investigation, said “it is too early to determine what happened, or if anything happened at all,” and accused Netanyahu of running “an orchestrated and organized campaign to delegitimize the election results”.
Why Arab-party support matters
Netanyahu’s critics see the allegations as an effort to discredit the Arab-led parties and make cooperation with Eisenkot politically impossible. The BBC described that cooperation as Eisenkot’s bloc’s only current route to power.
Under the government-formation process, the president will appoint the party leader judged most likely to form a majority government.
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