Israel's Herzog Accepts Vote, Opens Coalition Talks — SkimNews
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- Isaac Herzog accepted the certified results of last week's parliamentary elections as legally binding on Wednesday and opened consultations with party representatives on forming a government, declaring: "The elections are over. Now is the time to face reality."
- Noam Sohlberg, head of the elections committee, said a review of all parties' fraud claims found "no evidence of irregularities that compromised the integrity of the election or affected its results," calling the vote legally binding and warning that public trust is "easy to destroy, yet very difficult to repair."
- Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies lost their Knesset majority in the Oct. 27 vote, and neither his bloc nor Gadi Eisenkot's bloc won the majority needed to govern, while Arab-led parties made historic gains; Herzog has several days to name a candidate, with weeks of negotiations to follow and a new election early next year if neither succeeds.
- Likud, Netanyahu's party, and Eisenkot's Yashar will make the final pitches to Herzog on Thursday, after three Netanyahu-aligned religious-nationalist factions recommended he be given a chance to form a coalition and a fourth, led by a former Netanyahu ally turned rival, recommended Eisenkot; eight more parties, including the two Arab-led factions, meet first.
- Shin Bet, the intelligence service headed by David Zini, a Netanyahu appointee and loyalist, is still probing foreign interference, and an assessment read at a closed committee meeting cited a "widespread phenomenon involving the influx of substantial funds into Israel from foreign states" while providing no evidence to explain the assertion.
- Gali Baharav-Miara, Israel's attorney general, rejected the Shin Bet's request to interrogate Mansour Abbas and other senior Arab lawmakers, saying it is "not permissible to interrogate citizens or elected officials without evidence to justify this action"; the Joint List of Arab parties called it a "campaign of incitement."
- Itamar Ben-Gvir, a far-right Netanyahu ally with no authority over the Shin Bet, called on it to "arrest all the leaders of the Arab political parties" and interrogate them in "basement interrogation cells," while Herzog said the investigation should proceed but that Arab Israeli voters "must not be smeared."
Why it matters: Netanyahu's fraud claims have been formally rejected as unsupported, and no bloc holds a majority after the Oct. 27 vote, so the two Arab-led factions — whose gains were historic — carry unusual weight in coalition arithmetic alongside eight parties still to meet Herzog. If neither Netanyahu nor Eisenkot can put together a government, Israel would hold a new election early next year.
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