Israel’s president accepts certified election results in a blow to Netanyahu's claim of vote fraud

JERUSALEM (AP) — Israeli President Isaac Herzog on Wednesday accepted as legally binding the certified results from last week’s parliamentary elections and said he would begin consultations with party representatives on the formation of a new government.

Herzog's acceptance of the results as valid dealt a blow to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's effort to discredit the vote in which his religious-nationalist bloc lost its majority in the Israeli parliament , or Knesset, while Arab-led parties made historic gains .

Netanyahu and his supporters have repeatedly made unsubstantiated claims that the Arab-led parties had “stolen” the election, possibly with foreign assistance.

The Israeli president is required now to sit down with various party leaders to determine who to name as prime minister-designate — a process that could potentially bring Netanyahu’s opponents to power.

Israel’s election commission said earlier on Wednesday that after a thorough investigation of all parties’ claims of fraud it had found “no evidence of irregularities that compromised the integrity of the election or affected its results.”

Netanyahu’s Likud party did not respond to a request for comment.

A separate investigation by the Shin Bet intelligence service, which is headed by David Zini, a Netanyahu appointee and loyalist, into allegations of foreign interference in the election is still ongoing.

In a private meeting Wednesday of the election committee's members, its head, Supreme Court Justice Noam Sohlberg, read out an intelligence assessment from the Shin Bet saying the agency believed there had been a “widespread phenomenon involving the influx of substantial funds into Israel from foreign states,” including from countries hostile toward Israel.

The Shin Bet provided no evidence to explain its assertion. The Associated Press obtained a transcript of the assessment from a person who attended the meeting. The person requested anonymity to discuss a closed-door meeting.

The committee has previously said that while claims about foreign actors seeking to influence the election are serious and under investigation, it does not believe that any such interference affected the results — even if it had happened.

Sohlberg reiterated that stance on Wednesday.

“At this stage, these are merely suspicions, and even if they are substantiated, the scope of their potential impact is limited,” he said during a ceremony to present the certified election results to Herzog.

Sohlberg added that it was dangerous to cast doubt on the results and said they are legally binding.

Public trust in the electoral process is “easy to destroy, yet very difficult to repair,” he warned.

In the Oct. 27 vote, neither Netanyahu’s bloc nor the bloc of allies of his chief rival, opposition leader Gadi Eisenkot , secured a parliamentary majority needed to form a new government , raising the possibility of an alliance between the two rivals or an alliance between Eisenkot and some of the Arab-led parties.

Israel’s president is now expected to begin a series of sit-downs with political parties. The meetings are expected to unfold over the next several days.

Herzog is then to choose the candidate — most likely Netanyahu or Eisenkot — who he believes is most likely to be able to form a coalition government, setting the stage for weeks of negotiations.

If neither man can put together a government, the country would hold a new election early next year.

The Shin Bet had requested approval from Israel’s attorney general on Tuesday to interrogate several elected officials as part of the agency’s separate probe, including the Ra’am party leader Mansour Abbas and other senior Arab lawmakers, Israeli media reported.

The request was sharply rejected.

“It is not permissible to interrogate citizens or elected officials without evidence to justify such action,” Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara said.

The Joint List of Arab parties condemned the request, calling it a “campaign of incitement” by Netanyahu and his allies designed to delegitimize the Arab vote.

A far-right ally of Netanyahu, Itamar Ben-Gvir, rejected the committee’s findings that the elections were valid.

He called on the Shin Bet, over which he has no jurisdiction, to “arrest all the leaders of the Arab political parties" and to interrogate them in "basement interrogation cells until these suspicions are fully clarified.”

Herzog said Wednesday that the Shin Bet investigation into possible foreign interference should play out. But he cautioned that Arab Israeli voters “must not be smeared.”

“I condemn the coarseness and racist expressions that we have heard recently,” Herzog said.

Associated Press writer Natalie Melzer in Nahariya, Israel, contributed to this report.