Parties lure undecided voters as Israel poll nears

Israeli soldiers headed to the polls on Sunday, two days ahead of a general election, the military said, as politicians made last-ditch appeals before nationwide voting gets underway. The army said the first military ballot boxes went into action at the defence ministry's massive Tel Aviv headquarters, for the benefit of "officers and soldiers unable to vote on Tuesday because of operational activity." It said voting was being extended to bases across the country on Sunday and Monday, in addition to Tuesday itself. Political infighting intensified as campaigning drew close to an end and parties scrambled to win the votes of the 15 percent of Israelis who opinion polls said were still undecided. The centrist HaTnuah of former foreign minister Tzipi Livni reportedly sought to disqualify one of the hardline pro-settler Jewish Home party's candidates after footage surfaced of him speculating about the destruction of Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock mosque, one of Islam's holiest sites. Israeli television screened a clip of US-born Jeremy Gimpel speaking to members of a Florida church during a 2011 trip to the United States. "Imagine today if the dome, the golden dome -- I'm being recorded so I can't say blown up -- but let's say the dome was blown up, right, and we laid the cornerstone of the temple in Jerusalem, can you imagine?" The chairman of the Central Elections Committee told army radio he had yet to see a formal request to disqualify Gimpel, who is 14th on the Jewish Home's list. With polls projecting the party to win between 12 to 15 seats in the new parliament, compared with three in 2009, Gimpel's chances of winning a seat remain in the balance. Jewish Home was also under fire from the nonagenarian spiritual leader of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, who lambasted the party's brand of Orthodox, rather than ultra-Orthodox, Judaism. "They call it the Jewish Home, it's the gentile home," the firebrand Rabbi Ovadia Yosef said in comments broadcast on public radio. "Anyone who supports them is an unbeliever." Jewish Home head Naftali Bennett rejected Yosef's charges, saying that to the contrary, "our goal is to bring the the Jewish people the beauty of Judaism and tradition, and be a bridge between the religious and the secular". "In these days, we are being attacked by all the parties," he wrote on Facebook. "We must be on the right track." Elsewhere, the heads of the other major parties made final pitches across the country. Livni appeared in the town of Sderot, near the border with Gaza, while Labour leader Shelly Yachimovich campaigned to mothers outside a Tel Aviv kindergarten. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the head of Likud, attended the funeral of settler pioneer and former Knesset member Ron Nahman in the settlement of Ariel in the northern West Bank which Nahman established and led as mayor. "Ariel, the capital of Samaria, is a central component of Israel's security belt," Netanyahu said in his eulogy. "Its name is synonymous to Jerusalem and the Temple," Netanyahu said of Ariel, "and for a good reason -- God willing, the way Jerusalem will remain our eternal capital forever, Ariel has been and will always be an inseparable part of Israel." Members of Netanyahu's camp briefly unrolled huge banners with his image off the walls of Jerusalem's Old City sporting the slogan "Only Netanyahu will guard Jerusalem". Another banner read "Caution! '67 borders ahead," referring to the fact that between 1948 and the 1967 war, the Old City and other parts of east Jerusalem were held by Jordan. The activists collected the banners and left before police arrived. Opinion polls figures published Friday showed the joint electoral list of Netanyahu's rightwing Likud and the hardline nationalist Yisrael Beitenu losing support. The polls show the list winning between 32 and 35 seats in the 120-member parliament, down from 42 in the outgoing Knesset. The opinion polls showed Labour coming second with 16-17 seats, slightly ahead of the top estimates for Jewish Home. The new centrist Yesh Atid party is seen taking 11-13 seats, and Shas is expected to win 10-12. HaTnuah is expected to take seven or eight, closely followed by the leftwing Meretz, which is set to double its showing with five or six.