Party leaders made their final pitch to voters on Monday, less than 24 hours before voting began in more than 10,000 polling stations across Israel.

Both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his chief rival, the head of the center-left bloc Blue and White Party Benny Gantz, appealed to voters, asking for a clear mandate in the next Knesset to lead the country.

Netanyahu toured Jerusalem’s open-air Machane Yehuda market, considered a Likud bastion, warning shopkeepers that the center-left bloc Blue and White might was on the verge of toppling the right.

Netanyahu, who has given a torrent of interviews to drive home this message, reiterated his claim that if Likud did not win the most seats in the Knesset, it would be denied the chance to form the next government because small right-wing parties would join a left-wing coalition.

Later on in the day, Netanyahu made a visit to the Western Wall in Jerusalem. He also tweeted a picture of himself placing a note inside the cracks in the wall, as is customary. “With God’s help , and with your help, we will win,” he wrote in the tweet.

Aliyah and Integration Minister Yoav Gallant, the head of the Likud’s grassroots organization, made several campaign stops, telling supporters that “every vote must go to Likud so that we become the largest party, and ensure that Blue and White leaders Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid would not take power and take Israel backwards; we must make our every effort, we can win.”

Meanwhile, Gantz and the other top candidates in Blue and White took to social media to urge voters who were leaning left to cast their ballot for the center-left bloc, noting that all they needed to get the presidential nod to form a government was a clear-cut advantage of five seats over Likud. Gantz and former Israel Defense Forces’ Chief of General Staff Gabi Ashkenazi, who is fourth on the Blue and White candidate list, also gave several interviews.

Source:https://www.jns.org/feed/