TEL AVIV: Israel Prime Minister Yair Lapid on Thursday congratulated Benjamin Netanyahu on his election win as final results confirmed the former premier’s triumphant comeback at the head of a solidly right-wing alliance.
Netanyahu’s victory is set to end an unprecedented stalemate in Israel after five elections in less than four years.
This time around Netanyahu, the dominant Israeli politician of his generation, won a clear parliamentary majority, boosted by ultranationalist and religious parties. Tuesday’s ballot saw out the centrist Lapid, and his rare alliance of conservatives, liberals and Arab politicians which, over 18 months in power, made diplomatic inroads with Turkey and Lebanon and kept the economy humming.
But with the conflict with the Palestinians surging anew and touching off Jewish-Arab tensions within Israel, Netanyahu’s rightist Likud and kindred parties took 64 of the Knesset’s 120 seats. Netanyahu still has to be officially tasked by the president with forming a government, a process that could take weeks.
“The time has come to impose order here. The time has come for there to be a landlord,” tweeted Itamar Ben-Gvir of the far-right Religious Zionism party, Likud’s likely senior partner.
He was responding to a stabbing reported by Jerusalem police. In the West Bank, troops killed an Islamic Jihad militant and a 45-year-old man in a separate incident, medics said. Queried on the latter death, the army said it opened fire when Palestinians attacked them with rocks and petrol bombs. –Agencies
