Over 20,000 police and Border Police officers and police volunteers will be
deployed across the country to secure polling stations on Tuesday, Israel Police
spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said.
The officers will be in charge of keeping
the peace at some 10,132 polling stations, with a focus on “ensuring that the
public can exercise their right to vote without any problems whatsoever,”
Rosenfeld said, adding that acts of political vandalism in recent days have
highlighted the importance of a strong police presence on Election
Day.
“In recent days, you’ve had incidents of people tearing down signs,
or burning books, because of internal rivalries, or other things, and this is
something that we are keeping in mind for tomorrow.”
On Sunday there were
a number of such incidents reported, including the spraying of graffiti reading
“Yigal Amir was right” on the wall of The Tzipi Livni Party building and the
torching of Shas-affiliated prayer books.
In Lod on Monday, police
received a complaint from activists for the right-wing Strong Israel party, who
said they were attacked while hanging up signs for the party in the Ganei Aviv
neighborhood of the mixed Jewish-Arab city.
Rosenfeld added that police
won’t be on a higher level of alert, just deployed in force around the country
to ensure that voting goes off without a hitch, and that tension and friction
between political rivals doesn’t play out in disturbances at the
polls.
The Tel Aviv District Police said on Sunday that they would deploy
2,000 police and Border Police officers and volunteers to patrol the 492 voting
stations in the city, with special emphasis on preventing election fraud and
violations of campaign laws by political parties.