Live updates: Netanyahu falls short again in Israeli election

Israelis have the day off on polling day. Many flocked to the beach in Tel Aviv and Yaffa. MEE spoke to beachgoers on their take on the election: 

Bat-Shachar is from an illegal settlement in the occupied West Bank and has come to spend the day on the beach in Tel Aviv.

The 20-year-old says she’ll be voting for Ayelet Shaked’s far-right Yamina party. “She supports the settlements and religious people in Judea and Samaria,” she tells MEE.

Her friend Adil, 21, voted Likud. “This land is for the Jewish people and only Netanyahu can give us security,” he says.

Benjamin Netanyahu's son, Yair, and other Israeli right-wing networks have been criticised for posting a stock image from Turkey, which claimed to show Palestinians voting in high numbers.

Social media users were quick to pick up on the prime minister's son retweeting a stock image of Turkish voters in Istanbul.

The pictures are part of a series of tactics used by Israel's right-wing to scare voters into casting their ballot before polls close.

Throughout the day, Yair Netanyahu and other right-wing figures have flooded social media with warnings that Palestinians and Israelis in left-wing areas have been voting in high numbers.

An Israeli reporter with Channel 13 has published a video showing members of Netanyahu’s Likud party installing “face-recognising” cameras outside a polling station in a Palestinian village near the city of Nazareth, inside Israel.

Akiva Novick was heavily criticised for the video, with The Times of Israel saying that the journalist “seems to reveal that he did indeed get the information from Likud itself”.

Novick later corrected his report and said that the Likud cameras could not "recognise faces". 

A Likud spokesperson responded by saying they had "no comment".

Netanyahu has tried to push a bill to install cameras in polling stations but a Knesset committee struck it down a week before the election started.

Critics saw Likud's plan as a way of sending a message to Israel's Palestinian community in the hope of keeping them away from the ballot box.

Facebook has now reinstated the chatbot features on Benjamin Netanyahu's page after the prime minister promised to not publish poll results, an act that is illegal on Israel's election day.

The chat features were also restored on the condition that Netanyahu would not be conducting any radio or television interviews, which are also banned under Israeli election rules.

Netanyahu for his part has already broken this rule by speaking twice on Israeli radio and posted a video of himself on Facebook talking about the polls.

Palestinian citizens of Israel - who represent some 20 percent of the country’s population - are torn about whether to participate in today's elections. While some believe it is important to keep some representation in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, others advocate skipping the polls, using the hashtag #قاطع, or “boycott”, to argue their case.

For activists like Mohammed Kabha, boycotting the elections signals a rejection of the Israeli occupation, its institutions, practices and racist laws. Kabha tells MEE the electoral boycott movement has been ongoing for decades, but is being amplified by social media.

“The Palestinian people instinctively do not believe in the institutions of occupation,” he said. “They believe that real change is not through the Israeli Knesset, despite all the financial resources that the occupation is pumping in to encourage people to participate in elections and vote for Israeli parties."

While the impact of a boycott is hard to quantify, the Joint List - a coalition of political parties representing Palestinian citizens of Israel - estimated that the turnout for Palestinian voters stood at 21 percent as of 2pm, compared to a general turnout rate of 36.5 percent.

Avigdor Lieberman, the chairman of the Yisrael Beiteinu party (United Torah Judaism Party), shared a video titled “Today, ultra-Orthodox Jews are going to war.”

To a background of military music, the video shows clips of a speech from a rabbi urging the crowd to vote for the United Torah Judaism party.

“The tools of the war is election… if everyone here brings another one and votes for [United Torah Judaism], we will double our power,” the speaker said.

Lieberman, who served as Israel’s defence minister until November, has pushed for a controversial law that seeks to draft members of the ultra-Orthodox community into the army.

The conscription bill has been almost forgotten amid the intense election campaign, but it was the tipping point that led Israel into an election less than six months after the last one in May, according to Ynet's news Hebriew site.

Benjamin Netanyahu breached Israeli election laws by giving two illegal radio interviews on Tuesday. He gave one interview to the right-wing Kol Chai radio station and another one to the Galey Israel radio station.

The interviews are in breach of Section 129 of Israeli election law, according to Haaretz. Last week, Israel's Central Election Committee issued a directive forbidding radio and television interviews with candidates on election day.

The Ultra-Orthodox Jerusalem neighbourhood of Mea Shearim is totally devoid of polling stations. Instead, there are posters reading: “NO participation in the impure election for this Knesset”.

Many Haredi here belongs to Neturei Karta group that rejects the idea of a Zionist state. Residents of the neighbourhood live according to strict Ultra-Orthodox customs.

Shai, a Haredi man in his 40s, runs a Jewish gift shop. “I don’t see myself as part of this country. We have our own life here,” he tells MEE.

“I pay my taxes and what do I receive back? Nothing except showing us as monsters and the bad face of Israel.”

Shai says there is a lot of violence against Haredi, but it is ignored by the Israeli media. “See how much charity work we do here? No one goes hungry, but they treat us like animals."

Facebook confirmed on Tuesday that it had suspended the use of automatic messaging on Netanyahu's official page. 

A spokesperson said Netanyahu's page broke Israeli election law by distributing polling statistics three days prior to Tuesday's vote.

"We're working with election officials around the world to ensure to help ensure the integrity of the elections," the spokesperson said in a statement.

"Our policy explicitly states that developers are required to obey all laws applicable in the country where their application is accessible. Therefore we’ve suspended the [Netanyahu] bot’s activity, in light of the violation of local law, until the close of the polls” at 10 p.m. on Tuesday.

This latest suspension comes a week after Facebook temporarily suspended Netanyahu's chatbot after it sent users a message stating that "Arabs want to annihilate us all-women, children and men."

Several Israeli party leaders have claimed that Palestinian citizens of Israel have come out in droves to vote in the Israeli elections. 

But Palestinians who spoke to MEE's Daniel Hilton and Lubna Masarwa in the Galilee region were in two minds over whether to come out and vote. 

Some said Israel's nation-state law turned them against voting while others said Netanyahu's racially charged campaign provoked many to consider voting in today's election. 

Here's their dispatch from northern Israel's Galilee region where a large Palestinian population live. 

Jerusalem local and Middle East Eye journalist Mustafa Abu Sneineh adds his take on Benjamin Netanyahu's election day antics:

Benjamin Netanyahu is using a tactic that has proved effective in previous elections and secured him the prime minister's seat: scaring his electorate into thinking that Palestinian citizens of Israel are voting in droves.

This time, Netanyahu claimed that the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah issued a statement asking the Arab community inside Israel to vote to put an end to his term in power.

He also published a picture showing an empty voting station in the town of Holon, a Likud stronghold, comparing it to a packed station in Tel Aviv voting for the “left”. In the 2015 election, Netanyahu said in a video that the Israeli left is transporting “Arabs in buses” to go to vote and that a right-wing government in Israel is in “danger.”

Israel's election committee has said that voter turnout at this stage is already higher than the previous election.

According to the Central Election Committee, turnout is at 26.8 per cent, two per cent higher than the last election.

Orly Adas, Israel's Central Election Committee director, said in a statement that the latest figure means 1,713,936 voters had already voted. 

Tovya Yalo is an Israeli of Ethiopian descent, and is campaigning for the Blue and White party in Bat Yam, on the Mediterranean coast.

His community has witnessed huge protests this year in response to discrimination and police brutality.

“We in the community are boiling inside,” he tells MEE. “What angers me the most is that Netanyahu hasn’t said anything about it, and that’s why I’m with Blue and White.”

Yalo says older Israeli-Ethiopians find it hard to vote anything other than Likud, and he’s been criticised by his parents

“But Blue and White has two Ethiopian candidates and I believe they can make change.”

While Israeli citizens head to the polls, Palestinians are prevented from leaving the occupied territories on Tuesday.

On Monday, the Israeli army confirmed that all checkpoints and crossings between Israel and the Gaza Strip and the West Bank would be closed for 24 hours on Tuesday during the election, with exceptions made for humanitarian and medical cases.

According to Palestinian Authority (PA) Civil Affairs spokesman Walid Wahdan, some 150,000 Palestinians with permits to work in Israel will be forced to stay home because of the closures.

With unemployment and poverty levels high in the occupied Palestinian territories, and Israel regularly withholding taxes it collects on behalf of the PA, economic journalist Jaafar Sadaqa told Middle East Eye that Palestinians working in Israel bring an estimated 10bn shekels ($2.8bn) in much-needed wages into the Palestinian economy.

“Even one day is important and economically influential,” Sadaqa said.