Israel election: Settler PR firm boasts of lowering Arab voter turnout after providing Netanyahu’s party with hidden cameras

‘[Arab] voter turnout dropped to under 50 per cent the lowest seen in recent years!’ the company claims

An Arab-Israeli woman casts her ballot at a polling station in Haifa (Reuters)

An Israeli PR company, led by a settler, has claimed it helped Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party plant 1,200 hidden cameras across Arab polling stations – boasting it drove down voter turnout in the election to a record low.

The discovery of the hidden cameras sparked uproar and multiple complaints on the day of the election, and even calls for the party to be disqualified.

The police confiscated dozens of the devices, while the Central Elections Committee said no one could be filmed entering a polling station or voting.

Mr Netanyahu later defended the move, saying the cameras were intended to ensure voting was “valid”.

PR company Kaizler Inbar published a photo on Facebook of its senior staff with Mr Netanyahu and his wife Sara on Wednesday, shortly after the vote.

“Shush, don’t tell anyone. It was us,” the post read, claiming they had stopped “thousands of forgeries” at Arab polling stations.

“Thanks to the fact that our observers were placed in every [Arab] polling station, the percentage of voter turnout dropped to under 50 per cent the lowest seen in recent years!” They added.

The company went on to say they had a “deep and close partnership with the best people in Likud”.

“We put together an operation that contributed crucially to one of the most important achievements of the right-wing bloc: validity in the Arab vote.”

Arab voter turnout was at an all-time low in the Tuesday election, according to Israeli media which said just 50.4 per cent of Arabs cast their ballots, compared to 64.5 per cent in 2015.

There had been a noisy boycott movement in the weeks before from Israel’s estimated 1.9 million Arab population, amid rising disillusionment in the election process and anger at soaring levels of racism in Israel.

Many cited Mr Netanyahu’s divisive campaign tactics including promising to annex the occupied West Bank, which is illegal under international law. Others were upset by legislation pushed through by his government last year that declared Israel to be the nation state of the Jewish population.

Hours before the polling stations closed, veteran Arab lawmaker Ahmad Tibi, who heads up the Hadash-Ta’al party alliance, tweeted that a low turnout was a “real danger” to all the Arab parties and warned it would seriously harm representation in the parliament.

When news broke of the hidden cameras, and videos were shared showing young Likud activists with recording devices in their clothes, Mr Tibi called it a “direct attempt to sabotage” the freedom to vote.

Jamil Baransi, deputy mayor of Reineh, an Arab town in northern Israel, said in all of the 17 local polling stations monitors from right-wing parties had brought cameras.

“We noticed that each one of these representatives had a camera on them, on their bodies,” he said, and that the cameras were “designed to intimidate voters”.

Tibi’s Hadash-Ta’al later told Isreali paper Haaretz the discovery of the cameras sparked “riots and confrontations, halting the voting process at some stations”.

“The situation caused fear among many voters who were afraid to get to the polling sites – which was the intention of Likud and the camera operators,” the party added.

Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara with the heads of Kaizler Inbar PR company (קייזלר ענבר Facebook page)

A Likud party official confirmed cameras were used to ensure there would be no voting fraud.

“They are not hidden cameras. They are cameras in the open,” Kobi Matza, a Likud election official, told Kan radio station. “We are worried about counterfeit [votes] in the Arab sector.”

According to Haaretz, Kaizler Inbar is headed by Sagi Kaizler, a leading figure in the settler community in the occupied West Bank.

Mr Kaizler confirmed to the paper his company was behind the Likud operation.

Vote counting was completed on Thursday morning but the final results have yet to be released. Provisional results show Mr Netanyahu’s Likud party and a rival centrist alliance called the Blue and White party were neck-to-neck with 35 seats each of the 120-seat parliament.

Blue and White, however, conceded defeat on Wednesday evening as they were unable to secure enough support from other parties to forge a majority coalition and build a government. The vote count has so far shown Likud and its ultra nationalist and religious allies would command a 65-55 majority in the legislator.