Israeli court recommends Arab candidate pull election bid over Hamas comments

The Israeli Supreme Court recommended Thursday that Sami Abu Shehadeh, the chairman of the left-leaning Palestinian nationalist Balad Party, withdraw his candidacy for the Oct. 27 elections over comments he made about the terror group Hamas.

Last week, The Jerusalem Post reported that Israel’s Central Elections Committee voted to bar the country’s two main Arab-majority political lists from the Oct. 27 parliamentary election. After the decision was appealed to the Supreme Court, Judge Yitzhak Amit and all nine justices recommended that Shehadeh withdraw his candidacy for the Knesset, according to Israeli news outlet Haredim 10. The judge characterized Shehadeh’s previous statements about the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks as outrageous and disgusting and disqualified him.

In doing this, the judge gave Shehadeh the option to choose by Friday morning whether to resign on his own or have a ruling written that would disqualify him from running for the Israeli Knesset.

What did they say disqualified Shehadeh? Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara supported Shehadeh’s disqualification over an article he published one day after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks that she said expressed support for the terror attacks against Israel, according to The Times of Israel. In the article, he called the attack a “significant historical event in military, political, and strategic terms”. Later in the article he said, “if small, besieged Gaza can do this on this scale, others can do it more effectively and simply.”

Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, chairman of the right-leaning Otzma Yehudit Party, argued that the Balad leader had supported the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack. He said that Shehadeh cannot be a member of Knesset because he is a supporter of terrorism that belongs in prison. Shehadeh denied supporting violence or terrorism and argued that the article did not provide grounds for disqualifying him, according to The Times of Israel.