Israel's Central Elections Committee on Wednesday confirmed the final results of last week's vote and formally rejected allegations of mass fraud and foreign interference promoted by Benjamin Netanyahu. The committee found "no evidence of irregularities that compromised the integrity of the election or affected its results." Some suspicions remain under investigation but, per committee chair Noam Sohlberg, "they do not cast doubt on the election as a whole or justify delaying the election results." The results were handed to President Isaac Herzog, who is expected to tap Gadi Eisenkot — the former military chief who lost his son fighting in Gaza — as early as Thursday evening to form a government. The fraud narrative was never the main event. The real crisis is what Netanyahu's apparatus attempted behind it. Shin Bet chief David Zini, handpicked by Netanyahu, ordered interrogations of senior politicians from Palestinian-led parties and sought to classify the investigation as a security file — a designation that would have permitted harsher conditions including denial of legal counsel. Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara blocked the demand, stating plainly: "In a country governed by the rule of law, neither citizens nor elected officials can be interrogated without evidence that justifies doing so." Eisenkot framed the episode as an attempted coup by other means, calling it a "pogrom against democracy." His statement drew a sharp institutional line: "The employees of the Ministry of Defense, law enforcement and the civil service in Israel are servants of the state, not the king. Woe to anyone who abuses their authority and role for political considerations." He warned that attempts to undermine trust in the results would continue. Palestinian citizens of Israel — roughly 20% of the population — turned out to vote at historic rates, a fact that became the target of Netanyahu's racist election-day campaign. Herzog, presenting the certified results, condemned the backlash explicitly: "I condemn the coarseness and racist expressions that we have heard recently. I hold Arab society in Israel in great respect." The statement was notable for its directness from a president who typically operates in conciliatory register. The coalition math now favors Eisenkot. All Jewish Israeli opposition parties have publicly backed him, and Palestinian-led parties have signaled their priority is removing Netanyahu, making them likely to support his candidacy. Negotiations could take weeks, but the political gravity has shifted. Ahmad Tibi, one of the Palestinian politicians reportedly targeted by the Shin Bet, responded to the fraud allegations with surgical sarcasm: "According to the suspicion, in both cases the same sophisticated method was employed: people arrived in droves at the polling stations, cast a slip, and went home." Israeli journalist Nadav Eyal warned that the pattern is escalatory, not self-correcting. "The groundwork is steadily being laid for violence," he wrote. "What you're hearing breaking right now is the foundation of the legal and governmental orders in Israel." The fraud playbook — discredit results, weaponise security services, target minority voters — is now a documented sequence. Whether Israel's institutional guardrails hold through coalition formation will determine whether the election's outcome survives contact with the apparatus that lost it. The attorney general's intervention was the hinge. Without it, opposition politicians would have faced security interrogations without counsel, based on no evidence, under a classification designed for terrorism cases. That a single institutional actor stood between democratic process and its subversion is both reassuring and terrifying — resilience measured in one person's willingness to say no.
