Israeli Press
Israel's Monday papers count Likud's list and Iran's next war
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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Two files filled the Israeli press on Monday: the list that will carry Netanyahu's party into the election, and an Iran that Israeli reporters now describe as preparing for the next round rather than negotiating an end to this one.
Ynet counted the primaries. About 140,000 Likud members vote on Monday among 121 candidates, with 31 serving ministers and members of Knesset chasing roughly seventeen realistic places, only three of the eight serving women in contention, and Tali Gotlieb forecast to leap from twenty-fifth towards the top. Moran Azoulay noted the polls that show the party shedding about seven seats.
The site's analysts read the same numbers as Netanyahu's problem rather than his triumph: he holds the reserved slots he hands out himself, and fears that a list chosen by his most committed members will repel the voters he needs in October.
Maariv put the reserved slots on the record. Mati Tuchfeld wrote that the prime minister has stopped working beneath the table and has made plain whom he wants on the list and whom he is pushing off it. Miri Regev told the paper's radio programme that "they want to eliminate me". Yoaz Hendel used primaries morning to invite Likud members to leave for his own party.
The same paper carried the joint statement in which eight Arab and Muslim states blamed Israel for obstructing the American roadmap for Gaza, and Likud's answer that the statement was designed to weaken Netanyahu and strengthen Gadi Eisenkot.
Haaretz reported that the army is not enforcing the closed-military-zone order it declared around the besieged homes at Qusra, and separately, citing the Wall Street Journal, that Iran's leadership is preparing for a wider confrontation in the belief that the ceasefire mainly bought Washington and Israel time for a larger strike.
Walla carried a Lebanese diplomatic source, quoted by the Beirut paper Nidaa al-Watan, saying senior contacts between Beirut and Washington produced an understanding in which Israel settles for the strikes that killed two Hezbollah commanders and the movement does not answer them.
Ynet also gave space to Eisenkot's fifteen-billion-shekel plan for rebuilding the north, financed, his candidate Shaul Meridor said, by cutting coalition money from bodies that refuse conscription.
