The Supreme Court convened a nine-judge panel Wednesday morning to the recent decision to disqualify MK Heba Yazbak (Joint Arab List) from running in the upcoming elections.
In the Wednesday hearing, the Supreme Court's nine justices, led by Supreme Court Chief Justice Esther Hayut, will decide whether to approve the Central Elections Committee's decision to disqualify Yazbak due to her support for terrorism.
It is estimated that the Supreme Court will not approve the Central Elections Committee's decision, among other things because Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit has opposed the move.
Yazbak has praised terrorists, calling them "martyrs" ("shahid" in Arabic), and refused to condemn terrorism, explicitly implying that the only thing that is not legitimate is Israel's "occupation" of Judea and Samaria.
She has also praised Samir Kuntar, who murdered two members of the Haran family and a policeman in the northern Israeli city of Nahariya in 1979, crushing the four-year-old's head with the butt of his rifle after murdering her father in front of her. Her two-year-old sister died when the mother, hiding in a crawl space, accidentally smothered her while trying to prevent her cries from being heard. He was released in 2008 as part of a prisoner swap with Hezbollah.
In August, the Supreme Court disqualified two Otzma Yehudit candidates, Baruch Marzel and Bentzi Gopstein. Explaining their decision, Hayut said that Gopstein "systematically incited to racism against the Arab public: and that Facebook and Twitter images bearing Marzel's name are "clearly painted with incitement to racism."