Central Elections Committee begins hearings on bids to bar parties, candidates from running

By Ariela Karmel

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23 September 2026, 10:33 am

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Ariela Karmel is a political correspondent at The Times of Israel. She previously reported for Calcalist and Haaretz. She holds an MA in Middle Eastern and African History from Tel Aviv University and a BA in Political Science from the University of British Columbia.

The Central Elections Committee begins two days of hearings at the Knesset on petitions seeking to bar parties and candidates from running in the October 27 election, with most of the challenges targeting Arab parties and candidates.

Opening the hearings, committee chairman Supreme Court Deputy President Noam Sohlberg stresses that disqualification is an exceptional step that should be taken with restraint and caution. “Disqualifying a candidate or a slate denies an entire segment of the public the possibility of casting its vote for them. We must not take this lightly,” he says.

The committee is set to hold seven disqualification hearings — five concerning party slates and two concerning individual candidates.

Among the petitions are efforts by Likud, Otzma Yehudit and the Choose Life Forum to bar Mansour Abbas’s Islamist Ra’am party, as well as challenges targeting the Joint List, Balad chairman Sami Abu Shehadeh, and Hadash MK Ofer Cassif. Separate petitions seek to disqualify Otzma Yehudit, the Democrats and the Religious Zionism-Zehut slate.

Coalition parties hold 18 of the committee’s 31 seats, giving the governing bloc a voting majority.

Any decision to disqualify an individual candidate requires Supreme Court approval, while bans on party slates can be appealed to the court, which has historically set a high bar for disqualification and repeatedly overturned such decisions by the committee.

However, the attorney general and state attorney appeared to back disqualification for Abu Shehadeh yesterday over an article he penned appearing to support armed struggle against Israel, raising prospects that the court could uphold a decision barring the Balad leader from running.