Israeli Police Seize Alleged Vote-Buying Cash for an Arab Party. Netanyahu: 'They're Trying to Steal the Election'

Israel's police went into election day with a bribery case. Overnight, before the polls opened Tuesday, officers in the Negev desert arrested three men they suspect were about to pay people to vote for Ra'am, the Islamist Arab party led by Mansour Abbas. In the suspects' homes, police say, they found envelopes holding tens of thousands of shekels in cash, plus ballot slips and other evidence.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went straight to his voters. "This is an emergency call, because they are trying to steal the election from us," he said in a video to Likud supporters, as turnout across the country ran at its fastest pace in nearly half a century.

What the police actually said

The Israel Police statement, posted Tuesday morning, is careful and specific. Detectives from the Southern District's central unit arrested three residents of the Bedouin communities around Segev Shalom and Ar'ara, "on suspicion of involvement in an attempted election bribe, using money that was allegedly meant to be handed out to citizens in exchange for voting for the Ra'am party."

The three were sent to the district's fraud unit and were due in court Tuesday, where police planned to ask a judge to keep them in custody. Police said they would act "without bias" against any attempt to corrupt the vote. The statement does not accuse Ra'am's leaders of anything. It ends: "The investigation continues." (Quotes translated from Hebrew.)

Then the case got bigger. Israeli news site ynet first reported that police moved it to Lahav 433, the national unit that handles Israel's most serious corruption and organized-crime cases. Investigators are checking whether the three men are part of "an organized and extensive infrastructure" meant to sway the result, and the police intelligence division was brought in to measure how far it goes.

Think of it as the local sheriff handing a case to the FBI on the morning of the vote. Police are now checking whether this is bigger than three men.

Netanyahu: 'They are trying to steal the election'

Netanyahu was on it within hours. "A serious affair on election day: three suspects were arrested with envelopes of cash and Mansour Abbas ballots," he posted. "I demand that law enforcement investigate the incident." He told right-wing voters that "in the face of attempts to harm the integrity of the elections," they had to go vote.

He kept pressing all morning, with post after post warning that turnout was "higher than usual in the Arab sector" while right-wing strongholds were "indifferent." The same video closes on what he says is at stake.

What Ra'am says

Ra'am denies all of it. The party said its activists were arrested at home, "hours before the polls opened, and not near polling stations or voters," and called them "false arrests" meant to sink the party and "suppress the vote in Arab society." It blamed National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who oversees the police, and filed a complaint with the Central Elections Committee. It also claimed its Arabic-language ballots were running short in Nazareth and Shefa-Amr and that some had been found torn.

The committee's acting director general, Din Livne, told reporters the three were caught near their homes, in a vehicle with the envelopes, before reaching any polling station. He called it an isolated incident and said there were no similar cases elsewhere in the country so far.

Notice what Ra'am's published statements leave out: the cash. They argue about where and when the men were picked up, not about what police say they found.

The turnout race behind the warnings

Netanyahu's alarm comes with numbers attached. Israel's Central Elections Committee reported 16.68% turnout by 10 a.m. and 31.5% by noon, about 2.31 million of the 7,331,981 eligible voters. At noon in 2022 it was 28.4%. The committee called it the highest turnout at that hour since 1977. Turnout in army polling stations was 30% by 10 a.m., up from 25.7% at the same point in 2022, according to figures released for army polling stations.

Who is showing up matters as much as how many. In early polling-station reports, Israel Hayom's breakdown of the committee's data had Arab towns at 10.9% against 15.4% in Jewish towns. But the paper noted that in 2022 Arab voters turned out at about half the national pace, and Tuesday they were running at about three-quarters of it. Rahat, the biggest Bedouin city and a Ra'am stronghold, led the south at 36.9% in the committee's midday town data, well above the national 31.5%. Netanyahu posted a photo from Rahat with an order: "You must not stay home. Go vote Mahal, urgently. We are at war for our home!"

Early numbers from Jewish cities pointed the same way. By 10 a.m., left-leaning towns like Shoham and Modiin were above 12%, while right-leaning Jerusalem and Ashkelon sat at 9.6%.

Why one seat could decide it

Israel's Knesset has 120 seats, and it takes 61 to govern. The last polls voters were allowed to see showed neither Netanyahu's bloc nor the opposition getting there. That makes the race for the single biggest party, Likud against former army chief Gadi Eisenkot's Yashar, the ballgame.

Likud spelled it out in a post aimed at its own ally Ben-Gvir: "If Eisenkot gets one seat more than Likud, the President will give the task of forming a government to Eisenkot." (Translated from Hebrew.)

Ra'am says it is aiming for eight seats. In a race this close, eight seats is a kingmaker. Ra'am already played that role once, in 2021, when it became the first Arab party to join an Israeli governing coalition, the short-lived Bennett-Lapid government that pushed Netanyahu out.

So a bribery probe touching that party's voters on election morning isn't a side story. It goes straight to the question of who forms the next government.

What happens next

Polls close at 10 p.m. in Israel, when the TV networks release their exit polls. The three suspects face a detention hearing, and Lahav 433 now owns the case. Questions still open: how much money was seized in total, who supplied it, how many voters it was meant to reach, and whether the probe finds more envelopes. Police have not said.

Netanyahu has run this play before. On election day in 2015 he warned that Arab voters were heading to the polls "in droves," and Likud won 30 seats. This time, there's a police case to go with the warning.