Israel's main left-wing party, Hademocratim (The Democrats), launched its campaign for the October 27 legislative elections on Monday evening, after selecting its list of candidates through primaries.
The party is led by former deputy chief of staff Yair Golan, who took over Labor's leadership in May 2024 © X
Israel's main left-wing party, Hademocratim (The Democrats), launched its campaign for the October 27 legislative elections on Monday evening, after selecting its list of candidates through primaries.
Formed from the merger of the long-dominant Labor party with Meretz, the small secular party that failed to clear the electoral threshold in 2022, the Democrats are currently polling around 10 seats out of 120. The party is led by former deputy chief of staff Yair Golan, who took over Labor's leadership in May 2024.
The Democrats are the only party besides Arab factions to back a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Labor, the heir to David Ben-Gurion's Mapai party, governed Israel without interruption from 1948 to 1977 and was last in power in 2001. Under Merav Michaeli, a former journalist who entered the Knesset in 2013, it recorded its worst-ever result in the 2022 elections, winning just four seats.
Among the party's top ten candidates are three of Labor's four sitting lawmakers, two women and Reform rabbi Gilad Kariv, alongside human rights lawyer Gaby Lasky, former secretary-general of the anti-settlement group Peace Now, and Moshe Radman, one of the leaders of the protest movement against the outgoing government.
Speaking alongside the new candidates at the campaign launch in Tel Aviv, Golan said establishing a commission of inquiry into the October 7, 2023 attacks would be his party's top priority after the elections. The party said it had recruited more than 110,000 members in recent months, 86.2% of whom voted in Monday's primaries.
Lebanese army troops began deploying in the southern Lebanese town of Zawtar al-Gharbiyeh on Tuesday after Israeli forces withdrew from the area, a senior Lebanese security official said, in line with a U.S.-brokered plan.
Lebanese President Joseph Aoun will meet U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House on Tuesday to present a plan on how to disarm Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah and secure Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon.
U.S. President Donald Trump said on Monday that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will not be arrested when he visits the U.S., after New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said he was still considering the move.
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