Violence boosts Sharon's election campaign
Eight Palestinians, including four gunmen who infiltrated into Israel, and two Israelis were killed in new bloodshed which Israeli officials said was on the rise ahead of the Israeli election on January 28.
Surveys in Israeli daily newspapers Yedioth Ahronoth and Maariv showed Sharon's right-wing Likud party forecast to win up to 33 seats in the 120-member parliament.
Just last week, the Likud's predicted victory was whittled down to as few as 27 seats on news Israeli police were probing an allegedly illicit loan to Sharon to fund his 1999 campaign.
Israeli political commentators said some voters appeared to have rallied around the ex-general after the head of the Central Election Committee pulled the plug on a speech Sharon gave on Thursday night to rebut the allegations against him.
The decision to cut short Sharon's broadcast on the grounds he violated laws against campaign propaganda and the widespread media coverage of the scandal surrounding a $1.5 million loan from a South African businessman deepened feeling the aging leader was unfairly under attack, they said.
Israeli law bans political funding from abroad, but Sharon's last two predecessors in office have also been subject to police inquiries for alleged funding irregularities or corruption.
"Sharon may not have convinced the public of his innocence in the recent corruption scandals but he has apparently succeeded in lighting the tribal fire of the Likud and at least some of the voters are returning 'home'," Israeli commentator Hemi Shalev wrote in Maariv.
The Likud had already slipped from an expected 40-seat victory after allegations of vote-buying and ties to organised crime in its party primary broke last month.
The twin scandals had appeared to make the national ballot an open race that could have a broader influence on 27 months of Israeli-Palestinian bloodshed, pitting the Likud against its main rival, the centre-left Labour Party which has called for an immediate resumption of peace talks with the Palestinians.
But yesterday's polls showed Labour losing ground with a predicted 20-seat take in the election, down from as many as 24 seats forecast in surveys late last week.
Palestinian gunmen infiltrated into Israel in two separate attacks on Sunday night, one from the West Bank into the northern Israeli community of Gadish and a second from Egypt into southern Israel.
A security guard in Gadish was killed in the attack before troops killed the two gunmen, while an Israeli soldier died in a clash that erupted near the Egyptian border where the two gunmen were discovered and shot dead.
The militant group Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the Gadish attack.
"We are definitely witnessing a rising wave of terror," Israeli Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz told Israel Radio yesterday. "The approach of the elections in Israel is also connected to this."
But Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, founder of the militant Islamic group Hamas, denied that attacks in a 27-month-old Palestinian uprising against occupation were influenced by the ballot.
"We are defending ourselves and will not stop our resistance either before the election or after the election. Sharon and Mofaz will go and resistance will remain," Yassin said at a Gaza demonstration to support Palestinian detainees in Israeli jails.
On Saturday, the Palestinian leadership urged militants to halt attacks in the coming weeks which some commentators say only boost Israeli support for Sharon's tough tactics against the uprising.
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