The Central Elections Committee ruled Wednesday evening to disqualify the Ra'am party from the 26th Knesset elections, as well as the candidacies of MKs Ofer Cassif and Sami Abu Shehadeh, according to Channel 14. The decision will be submitted to the Supreme Court for review.
The Central Elections Committee on Wednesday evening expanded its earlier disqualification of the Ra'am party by also barring the candidacies of MKs Ofer Cassif and Sami Abu Shehadeh from the 26th Knesset elections, according to a Channel 14 report. The new ruling builds on an earlier committee vote reported by The Zioneer at 15:53 Jerusalem, in which 18 members supported disqualifying Ra'am, five opposed, and one abstained — a decision that saw a judge vote to disqualify a candidate for the first time in 20 years.
The committee first voted at 15:53 to disqualify Ra'am, as The Zioneer reported. The earlier vote also included a judge casting the first disqualification vote in two decades. The background to the disqualification of Abu Shehadeh includes his own testimony to the committee on Friday, September 18, reported by The Zioneer at 15:36 Jerusalem, in which he argued that his October 8, 2023 article was mistranslated, denied praising Hamas, and claimed his words were intended as a warning against the continuation of the 'campaign', not support for armed struggle.
As The Zioneer reported on July 13, MK Moshe Saada (Likud) claimed the state was aware of Ra'am chairman Mansour Abbas's meeting with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, with police only opening an investigation after the story was exposed on Channel 14. The committee's disqualification decisions are subject to an automatic review by the Supreme Court.
The full committee ruling, including the specific reasoning for disqualifying Cassif and Abu Shehadeh, will be submitted to the Supreme Court for review. The court has the final authority to uphold or overturn the disqualifications, and the legal basis for Cassif's exclusion has not yet been publicly detailed.
3 developments
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