Israeli Press
Israel's Tuesday papers rank Likud's winners and count Netanyahu's losses
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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One story filled the Israeli press on Tuesday morning: the list Likud chose for itself overnight, and what it costs the man who runs the party.
Ynet published the running count. With 98 percent of ballot boxes tallied, Energy Minister Eli Cohen took first place ahead of Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana and Justice Minister Yariv Levin, with Transport Minister Miri Regev and coalition chairman Ofir Katz completing the top five.
Almog Cohen jumped into the top ten. He was elected to the Knesset in 2022 on Itamar Ben Gvir's Otzma Yehudit slate, moved to Likud this month, and ran only because Netanyahu waived the party's tenure rule for him — a change Haaretz reported on 12 August.
Tali Gotlieb was pushed out of the top ten. Idit Silman, Avi Dichter and May Golan fell out of realistic range altogether, and Nir Barkat, the economy minister, was left fighting for a place that keeps him in the Knesset.
The site's analysts wrote the result as a paradox. Netanyahu strengthened his grip — his candidates won in the districts, and the turnout he is accused of suppressing stayed at about 75,000 voters — but the men and women who survived arrive bruised, and David Bitan, the party figure who spent the term opposing him, is coming back.
Maariv carried the morning-after manoeuvring. Mati Tuchfeld's paper reported pressure on Netanyahu to use the reserved-slot clause to rescue Dichter, and a separate report that the prime minister's office is quietly courting Moshe Kahlon and Tzega Melaku with promises of high places.
Aviv Bushinsky, once Netanyahu's adviser, told the paper the leader had won control and lost quality: a pale list, he said, with the party's only security figure apparently out, and a new Bitan-Barkat axis forming.
The column Palestinians should read#
Ynet ran an opinion piece headlined "A Kahanist virus in Likud". Its argument, in the author's own framing, is that Netanyahu is now eating the porridge he cooked: Likud voters are right-wing, not Kahanists, and Menachem Begin built a wall between the two that Netanyahu demolished.
The piece is one commentator's verdict, not a finding. But it is being written inside the Israeli mainstream about a party list on which a candidate from Ben Gvir's political family has just entered the top ten.
Beside the primaries#
Maariv's breaking desk reported that Kushner set Hamas a thirty-day test after his meeting with Netanyahu, and, citing Reuters, that overnight Israeli strikes hit a military base in Syria. Walla put the target at Abu al-Duhur airport in Idlib province, quoting a Syrian defence ministry source speaking to the Qatari paper Al-Araby Al-Jadeed.
Haaretz published the account of Dr Majed Alian, the Jerusalem dentist beaten by settlers on his own land near Bethlehem while police questioned him instead of them. The same paper argued that Trump wants time to settle the Iran file while Iran is the side using time well, escalating against the Kurds as the deadline to dismantle Iraq's militias approaches.
Ynet also spent a piece on Naim Qassem, who read out at a Beirut commemoration an article supposedly written by a Yedioth Ahronoth columnist named Moshe Yair. No such columnist exists; the text has circulated online as fabrication for two months.
