Voters in Israel are heading to the polls today in the first general election in nearly four years. At stake are 120 seats in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, where 61 votes will be needed to form a majority. Likud party leader Benjamin Netanyahu is seeking to extend his term as Israel’s longest-serving prime minister — that’s despite a warrant issued by the International Criminal Court seeking his arrest for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Gaza. Netanyahu also faces criminal charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust. His main challenger is Israel’s former army chief Gadi Eisenkot, who supports illegal Israeli settlements, opposes a Palestinian state and has vowed to destroy Hamas’s military wing in Gaza within 18 months. A prominent Palestinian citizen of Israel, Sami Abu Shehadeh, who leads the Palestinian nationalist political party Balad, was forced out of the race. Meanwhile, millions of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza Strip are ineligible to vote — even as election officials set up polling stations in illegal Israeli settlements.
