Bennett concedes defeat after a week of attempts to locate missing votes

After a week of desperate attempts to locate 1,453 ballots missing for his New Right party to pass the electoral threshold, Naftali Bennett concedes defeat.

Education Minister Naftali Bennett speaks at a press conference for his New Right party in the southern port city of Ashdod on March 26, 2019. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

“We did find irregularities at the polls and more, but that, in of itself, is not enough to cancel the election results. Our legal counsel will examine the findings in the next two weeks, but at this stage, we are moving on,” he says in a Facebook post.

He describes his co-chair, Ayelet Shaked, “the best justice minister in the history of Israel.”

“Together, in the past six years, we took the wheel and pulled it rightward and we managed to change, for the better, the direction of the State of Israel. The ship will continue to sail without us.”

“After six years of service as a minister, 100 days of campaigning, and another week of fighting for every vote, I can say: I did the best I could.”