Two days before Israel votes, Netanyahu's meeting with police chief draws opposition challenge

Two days before Israelis vote, a planned meeting between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the country’s police chief has turned into an election row, with the opposition asking the election watchdog to stop it.

Police Commissioner Danny Levy is expected to brief Netanyahu on how police will secure Tuesday’s general election. National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir is also reported to be attending. No one from the opposition or from the Central Elections Committee was originally invited. Levy was reported to have turned down a similar meeting with Ben Gvir alone on Thursday.

Yashar goes to the committee

Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar party wrote to the Central Elections Committee and the attorney general asking for the meeting to be cancelled, arguing that the prime minister is not responsible for the integrity of the vote. “We have reasonable grounds to believe that the purpose of this meeting is to create a false public perception,” the party wrote.

Yashar went further, saying “Netanyahu knows that he is going to lose” and warning that the meeting could be used to cast doubt on the results if the governing coalition is defeated.

The committee’s chairman, Supreme Court Justice Noam Sohlberg, ordered Netanyahu and Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara to respond to the petition by 10:30 am on Sunday.

Likud rejected the charge. The meeting “is a follow-up to a security discussion,” the party said, adding that it concerned security and not the fairness of the election. In answer to Sohlberg, Likud invited a representative of the committee to sit in.

Protection for opposition leaders

On the same morning, the Democrats party said its chairman, Yair Golan, would start receiving state-funded protection from a private firm working under the direction of the Shin Bet security service. Police had rated the threat against him at level 4 on a six-point scale after dozens of death threats, and the party had gone to the High Court earlier this month to get him a guard.

“That has now happened, two days before the election,” the Democrats said.

Yashar said Eisenkot had also been given protection from Sunday. Ofer Winter, leader of the People of Israel party, is reported to be getting a security detail too; his party did not comment.

The campaign has grown tense in its final days. On Saturday, a man was detained in Tel Aviv after allegedly attacking the security detail of former prime minister Naftali Bennett.

What happens next

Polls open on Tuesday, 27 October. The vote comes as Israel remains part of the wider regional war with Iran that began in February, a conflict that has already disrupted flights between India and the Gulf.