Ofakim full of posters for coalition parties, with activists for opposition Yisrael Beytenu admitting ‘support here is weak’

In Ofakim, a southern town where more than half of the population voted for Likud or the Sephardic ultra-Orthodox party Shas in 2022, the political posters are pitching for the coalition parties.

In the Ramat Shaked neighborhood, two young men at a small stall representing Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu are trying to hand out information. “Support here is weak,” they admit. Yisrael Beytenu is the only party from the opposition bloc to be seen outside the polling station.

At the Shas stall, Yosef Levi is handing out charms — pictures of the late rabbi Ovadia Yosef with a piece of willow leaf stuck behind plastic on the other side.

“Put this in your car, and you’ll never crash. You won’t need car insurance!” he shouts to passersby.

Inside the polling station, young Shirel Elhazov is looking at the list of parties and telling her sister, “Vote either Likud or Ben Gvir.”

Shirel was visiting her grandmother in Ofakim’s western Mishor Hagefen neighborhood on October 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists knocked on the door.

During the Hamas rampage through the town, 52 people, including residents, soldiers, and police officers, were cut down, 39 of them in Mishor Hagefen.

The family survived, but the scars remain. “I can’t support [Yashar’s Gadi] Eisenkot because he’s with Yair Golan [leader of the left-wing Democrats],” she says. “Did you hear Golan saying that there are innocent people in Gaza? What, and there were no innocents in [Kibbutz] Be’eri [where Hamas terrorists murdered around a 10th of the community and kidnapped 30 people]? We weren’t innocents?”

A woman running a stall for Avi Maoz’s far-right, religiously conservative party Noam sees on her cellphone that 50 percent of Arabs in Rahat have already voted, by contrast to previous years, when Arabs turned up to the polling stations mainly in the evenings. “We’re crazy that we gave them the vote,” she says to nobody in particular. She tells The Times of Israel, “They have their lands, Dubai, Iran. They’re desperate to emigrate. The British brought them in and suddenly the Arabs had been here for 2,000 years.”