Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Religious Zionist Party chairman Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich held an emergency meeting Tuesday with dozens of local authority heads in an effort to increase voter turnout among right-wing supporters during the final hours of the elections for the 26th Knesset.
During the meeting, the two warned of the possibility that the right-wing camp could lose the elections and called on local authority heads to mobilize their grassroots operations to bring additional voters to the polls.
Netanyahu attacked Yisrael Beytenu chairman Avigdor Liberman and warned against voting for his party.
"We need to wake people up, get them out of their homes to vote, and make sure they don't, God forbid, vote for Liberman. That's not right-wing, that's fake right-wing," Netanyahu said.
The Prime Minister added: "We can win, provided we get people out to vote. You need to get the real right-wing voters to the polls. Without Liberman. If he doesn't cross the electoral threshold, the seats go to us."
Smotrich addressed local authority heads in Judea and Samaria in particular, asking them to send activists to voter turnout operations in cities.
"Local authority heads in Judea and Samaria, leave emergency response teams in the communities. Everyone else should head down to the cities, join Israel Gantz's gathering points and the joint Likud-Religious Zionist headquarters, and go door to door," he said.
He warned about high voter turnout among left-wing voters and the Arab population and urged people not to vote for parties that, according to him, are unlikely to cross the electoral threshold.
"Voter turnout is very high, both on the left and in Arab communities. As the Prime Minister said, we could lose. Get people out to vote. Also explain why they shouldn't vote for Winter and others, because they won't cross the electoral threshold due to the high turnout. It's hopeless," he said.
The emergency meeting took place against the backdrop of exceptionally high turnout figures published by the Central Elections Committee.
According to the figures, by 4:00 p.m., 55.7% of eligible voters had cast their ballots, representing 4,085,075 voters.
This is the highest voter turnout recorded at that hour since the Central Elections Committee began measuring turnout in 1973.
In the elections for the 25th Knesset, held in 2022, turnout at the same hour stood at just 47.5% - a difference of 8.2 percentage points.
A total of 7,331,981 eligible voters are registered for the current elections, with voting taking place at more than 12,000 polling stations across the country.
Most polling stations will close at 10:00 p.m., when the first television exit polls are also expected to be released.
One of the main focuses of Netanyahu and Smotrich's efforts is the battle for the votes of people considering supporting smaller party lists, particularly the Amcha Yisrael Party led by Ofer Winter.
The electoral threshold in the elections stands at 3.25% of valid votes.
A party that fails to reach this threshold will not participate in the allocation of the Knesset's 120 seats, even if it receives tens of thousands of votes.
As the number of valid votes increases, so does the number of votes required to cross the electoral threshold.
The high voter turnout therefore intensifies concerns among the major parties about losing votes to smaller party lists.
The emergency meeting is part of a grassroots operation led by the "Right Wins" campaign headquarters, a joint initiative of Likud and the Religious Zionist Party.
Earlier, campaign chairman Israel Gantz told Arutz Sheva in an interview that approximately 4,500 volunteers were operating in right-wing strongholds across the country to bring voters to the polls.
Gantz described an operation involving hundreds of groups and dozens of buses, declaring that the campaign's goal was to bring tens of thousands of additional voters to polling stations in the hours remaining before voting ends.
"It's a battle, it's a battle. The Arabs are coming out to vote in large numbers. We will get right-wing voters out, we will fight, and we will win," Gantz said.
The campaign headquarters is now focusing its efforts on the final hours of Election Day, seeking to translate the volunteers' activities into increased voter turnout among right-wing supporters.