Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva turned 81 on Tuesday, promising to work “24 hours a day” following his historic re-election for a fourth term.

Lula won Sunday’s runoff against Flavio Bolsonaro with 51.8 per cent of the vote to the right-wing senator’s 48.2pc.

He is one of the world’s oldest leaders; US President Donald Trump, who turned 80 in June, is only a few months younger.

“I’m going to deliver the best term any president has ever served in the history of this country,” the leftist leader said in a video posted on Instagram. “I will dedicate 24 hours a day to making this country into the country everyone dreams of.”

Amid questions over his age, he boasted while campaigning that he was “fitter than ever”, jogging during events and posting videos on social media of his gym workouts.

Following his shock first-round defeat to Flavio Bolsonaro, the son of jailed ex-leader Jair Bolsonaro, Lula’s campaign had a social media makeover. The president bought his first-ever cellphone and declared himself “king of the selfie.”

In a speech after his dramatic victory on Sunday, he thanked the “rebellious youth” of Brazil for campaigning on his behalf.

Lula’s Workers’ Party (PT) called on supporters to celebrate his birthday outside the presidential residence in Brasilia on Tuesday.

MOSCOW — Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian told his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on Tuesday that the Middle East can solve its problems without the involvement of the United States. "I believe we are capable of resolving our problems in the region without relying on the United States," Pezeshkian said at a meeting with Putin on the sidelines of a summit of the Gas Exporting Countries Forum in Moscow. "Our trade is expanding and growing day by day. U.S. actions in the region make it easier for U.S. to move towards greater multilateralism and strengthen our cooperation with you and other countries subject to unilateral U.S. sanctions," he told Putin. Putin said he discussed the war with Pezeshkian, expressing hope that the situation would improve. "We spoke earlier, one-on-one, about the situation in the region -- a situation that, undoubtedly, cannot help but cause concern," he said, adding that he hoped it would "evolve in a positive direction." Pezeshkian said he was confident the will existed on both sides to expand cooperation in science, industry, culture, security and milit

JOINT BASE ANDREWS — President Donald Trump said Tuesday he would respect the results of the U.S. midterm elections "if they're honest," in what appeared to be a fresh bid to sow doubt ahead of next week's crucial vote. Trump has ramped up his baseless, years-old claims of mass voter fraud as polls show Republicans could lose control of Congress in Tuesday's elections. "I will, if they're honest elections," Trump told reporters when asked if he would respect the results of the midterms, as he headed on a campaign trip to Texas. The 80-year-old president also gave a guarded pledge to work with the rival Democrats if Republicans lose their grip on the House of Representatives and Senate. "We'll figure a way. Look, I have strong veto. I hope that that won't be the case, but if it is, that's happened before with many presidents," Trump said at Joint Base Andrews near Washington. "You have strong veto, and you end up working on deals." Republicans fear a Democrat "blue wave" in the midterms as voters punish them over inflation stoked by oil prices that have soared since Trump launched his war

WASHINGTON — U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday announced a $1 million reward for information about voter fraud, in a fresh bid to sow doubt ahead of the U.S. midterms and push his false claim about winning the 2020 election. "Anybody reporting Voter Fraud in the past Elections, or the upcoming 2026 Midterm Election, will be paid $1,000,000 upon the arrest and conviction of those that created the Fraud!" Trump wrote on his Truth Social network. The president gave no details of how the reward would be funded or administered. With the November 3 elections just eight days away, polls show Democrats pulling ahead as Republicans fight to retain control of both chambers of Congress. A Democratic victory would threaten to stall Trump's agenda and expose his administration to congressional investigations during his final two years in office. Trump has repeatedly made baseless allegations about election fraud, including his claim that he won the 2020 presidential election. Studies have consistently found voter fraud exceptionally rare, particularly voting by non-citizens, which is already ille

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Los médicos del sistema sanitario público catalán están llamados a hacer una huelga indefinida a partir de este miércoles. El sindicato mayoritario, Metges de Catalunya, convocó la huelga junto con otros sindicatos estatales, que la acabaron retirando ante las próximas elecciones generales. Pero el sindicato catalán la ha mantenido vigente y argumenta que el Govern no está en funciones y que el Departament de Salut tiene capacidad para implementar mejoras. Los médicos piden un convenio propio y medidas sobre todo ante la sobrecarga laboral, como eliminar las guardias de 24 horas o más tiempo para visitar a los pacientes en la atención primaria. Antes de ese paro indefinido ya habían convocado 12 jornadas de paro desde el pasado otoño.

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Kylian Mbappé pediu desculpa por ter chamado “ditador chinês” a Mao Zedong numa brincadeira que correu (muito mal) nas redes sociais. Tarde de mais para as marcas: Dongpeng, Mengniu e Milkground já o largaram, e a televisão estatal chinesa tirou a La Liga do ar. Era um meme. E, num vídeo que se tornou viral, Kylian Mbappé brincou no X com o antigo ditador chinês Mao Zedong. Mas a piada correu mal. Os chineses não gostaram. Quem não gostou também foram as marcas chinesas que apoiavam o craque francês do Real Madrid , que cancelaram os patrocínios. Esta terça-feira, Mbappé

UK anti-terrorism police said on Tuesday that two men have been charged with national security offences after an incident last month at a British airbase used by the United States, linking the scare to Iran.

The head of National Counter Terrorism Policing, Laurence Taylor, said two British men aged 24 had been charged: one with assisting a foreign intelligence service, believed to be in Iran, and another with entering a prohibited place for a purpose “prejudicial” to the United Kingdom.

This is the first time that anyone has been charged over the incident at RAF Fairford, after police arrested seven suspects in the days afterwards, before releasing them on bail.

Police were called to the Royal Air Force’s Fairford base in southwest England in the early hours of Sept 27 after a local farmer reported a group of men with several white vans engaged in “suspicious” activity.

“While some of the circumstances remain unclear, we are confident that this activity was conducted on behalf of a foreign intelligence service,” Taylor told reporters on Tuesday outside Metropolitan Police headquarters in London.

Days after the incident, the US withdrew all its B-1 bombers from the base.

Suspects charged

A week ago police said they had re-arrested two of the suspects, one of whom has now been charged.

Police charged 24-year-old Nouman Essghir with entering or approaching a “prohibited place” for a purpose “prejudicial” to the interests of the UK.

Essghir was arrested at the scene in Gloucestershire and then released on bail, before police re-arrested him a week ago.

The police chief said the charge against Essghir related to “suspected activity” more than a month earlier, on Saturday Aug 22, without giving any details.

The second man who has been charged, 24-year-old Mohmed Ahmad Abdulkarim, was arrested after being interviewed under caution over the last week, police said.

He has been charged with assisting a foreign intelligence service. “In this case, we believe that country to be Iran,” the police said.

Taylor said Counter Terrorism Policing had seen “a range of incidents in recent months that we believe have been directed by the Iranian state”.

“This is not a theoretical threat. This is something we are responding to every day,” he added.

Both of the charged men live in Westminster, a district in central London.

Six other men remain on bail, one of them a dual UK-Iranian national who had been re-arrested last week.

Taylor acknowledged that some of the police’s “decisions made during our investigations can sometimes appear illogical”.

“But I want to make it very clear that there will always be a good reason or rationale behind them,” he said.

Le président finlandais Alexander Stubb et le Premier ministre norvégien Jonas Gahr Støre ont eu, mardi 27 octobre, un entretien « franc et substantiel » avec Vladimir Poutine, à la suite des discussions entre Volodymyr Zelensky et les émissaires américains la semaine dernière à Oslo.

La Jordanie a affirmé mardi avoir tué ce lundi 26 octobre « plus de 20 combattants » du groupe État islamique (EI) lors de frappes en Syrie en réaction à un attentat meurtrier contre une église jordanienne. Pour sa part, Damas recense sept morts et dénonce une « violation inacceptable » de son espace aérien.

Final feliz para o herói da casa: Kane recebeu em Londres o maior galardão da carreira até agora. Alexia Putellas é a melhor do mundo pela terceira vez. O londrino Harry Kane tornou-se esta segunda-feira o primeiro inglês a conquistar a Bola de Ouro em 25 anos, na sua cidade natal, depois de superar a forte concorrência de Lamine Yamal e Kylian Mbappé. Alexia Putellas conquistou o prémio feminino pela terceira vez e prolongou o domínio espanhol do troféu, graças ao papel que teve ao levar o Barcelona à Liga dos Campeões da época passada, antes de se mudar para

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Indian authorities ordered nearly 100,000 people to evacuate homes in Andhra Pradesh and Odisha, ahead of a severe cyclone the national weather office expects to make landfall by Wednesday.

Neighbouring Nepal and Sri Lanka have also issued weather warnings.

Cyclone Arnab is forecast to hit India’s southwestern Andhra Pradesh coast as a “very severe cyclonic storm”, with gusts of up to 150 kilometres (93 miles) per hour on Wednesday morning, the India Meteorological Department said in a bulletin.

Torrential rain lashed the coast in the port city of Kakinda as heavy waves crashed on shore.

“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” Kotesh Kumar, 35, told AFP, adding the government warned people to stock up on groceries.

“There was a cyclone here three years ago, but the water didn’t rise this much.”

Cyclones, called hurricanes in the North Atlantic and typhoons in the Pacific, are a regular menace in the Bay of Bengal and northern Indian Ocean.

The storm season, however, has been turbocharged by the El Nino weather phenomenon that has caused unprecedented warming.

Neighbouring Sri Lanka, meanwhile, closed schools with warnings of torrential rain, with the island’s Department of Meteorology warning storms could trigger flash floods and mudslides.

The military has been placed on alert, Colombo’s Disaster Management Centre said.

Indian media reported that as many as 50,000 people have been told to move to safe areas in Andhra Pradesh, and 48,000 in Odisha.

‘Damage’

Nepal’s disaster authority issued a warning on Tuesday, saying that as the storm travels inland towards the Himalayas — likely overnight Thursday — it will bring heavy rainfall as well as “a high risk of heavy snowfall, snowstorms and avalanches”.

It called on tourists to avoid travelling to high mountain areas and advised those already there to remain in safe locations.

Nepal is still recovering from a catastrophic August 26 flood sparked by a glacial mountain collapse, which swept away more than 1,400 people and left over 5,000 missing.

India’s weather bureau said it expects the cyclone to result in “total destruction” of thatched houses and create localised flooding, uprooting of power and communication poles, and “widespread damage” to standing crops.

In Kakinada, police barricaded roads leading to the sea.

Andhra Pradesh State Chief Minister Nara Chandrababu Naidu ordered the storm to be “constantly monitored and advance precautions taken”, his office said in a statement on Monday.

“Adequate shelters and evacuation arrangements have been made,” New Delhi’s Cabinet Secretariat said in a statement.

The neighbouring Indian state of Odisha opened 1,735 cyclone shelters and imposed restrictions on movement in landslide-prone zone areas, the state’s information office said.

Local media reported that Andhra Pradesh authorities ordered evacuations in key, low-lying areas and shut “all educational institutions” in some districts from Tuesday until Saturday.

Over 4,700 pregnant women residing in potentially dangerous sites were moved to hospitals, according to The Indian Express newspaper.

Sudan’s warring sides have traded drone strikes that killed 21 people in the western Darfur region and left vast swathes of the country’s east without electricity, medics and witnesses said Tuesday.

A drone strike on a market in Nyala, the de facto capital of Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces in Darfur, killed 21 people and wounded at least 40 others, a medical source and witnesses told AFP.

One Nyala resident said a market in the city’s north was struck by a drone on Monday around 8pm (11pm PKT).

Another said the market was frequented by young men, particularly RSF fighters.

“Twenty-one people were killed in last night’s bombing, and more than 40 others injured,” a medic at Nyala Hospital said, though he was unable to identify how many were RSF fighters.

Sudan’s military, at war with the RSF since April 2023, regularly strikes Nyala, where the RSF has declared an administration rivalling the army-backed internationally recognised government in Khartoum.

The RSF has in turn launched repeated strikes targeting Khartoum’s airport, as well as dams and power stations across the country’s east.

On Tuesday, “RSF militia drones targeted the Al-Markhiyat transformer station, disrupting the power supply across large parts of Khartoum and Al-Jazira states,” a source in the national electricity company told AFP on condition of anonymity.

The strike comes a day after a coordinated RSF drone attack on six power stations left millions without power in Al-Jazira, White Nile, Sennar and Gedaref states.

Famine risk

The war is currently being fought primarily via drones, with both sides launching sophisticated attacks from across the country, killing dozens of civilians at a time.

In the first three weeks of October alone, drone strikes killed over 300 people and injured hundreds more, according to a UN tally.

Since it began, the war has killed more than 200,000 people, aid workers estimate, and has triggered the world’s largest hunger and displacement crises.

The United Nations has repeatedly warned that attacks on power stations threaten health and services for millions of people.

Close to three million people have returned to Khartoum state since it was recaptured by the army last year, but many have struggled to rebuild their lives in a scarred city.

Power and water supplies remain unreliable, much of the capital remains unsafe from unexploded bombs, and many struggle to put food on the table in a collapsed economy.

On Monday, 30 countries including the United States, France and the United Kingdom warned that urgent action was needed to prevent famine expanding across the country.

Sudan is facing “an alarming deterioration” of food security, they said, citing the war, a currency in freefall, higher fuel prices due to the Middle East war and a drought induced by the El Nino climate phenomenon.

Sudan’s foreign ministry on Monday insisted the country’s food security was “reassuring”, in an attempt to “refute claims of famine”.

It accused “some countries and organisations” of “politically exploiting the humanitarian situation”.

The army has for years denied claims of documented famine and has been accused of blocking access to humanitarian aid.

Taxa europeia sobre encomendas de fora da UE entra em vigor no domingo para travar “enxurrada chinesa”. A taxa de 2€ aplica-se a cada tipo de artigo numa encomenda enviada diretamente aos consumidores de fora da UE, independentemente do seu valor. A União Europeia vai aplicar, a partir de domingo, uma taxa de processamento de 2€  às encomendas provenientes de fora do bloco de 27 países, para travar a avalanche de produtos vindos da China. A nova taxa, que chega poucas semanas antes da corrida às compras da Black Friday, da Cyber Monday e do Natal, soma-se à taxa de

SAO PAULO — Flavio Bolsonaro's Liberal Party on Monday recognized the outcome of Brazil's presidential runoff, despite the candidate's objections to the poll won by leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Lula, who turns 81 on Tuesday, pulled off a dramatic comeback after trailing Bolsonaro in a first-round vote, a defeat which fired up the left on the streets and social media to secure him a fourth term in office. In the end, Lula pulled around 4.4 million more votes than his rival on Sunday. Bolsonaro, a right-wing senator and 45-year-old son of far-right former president Jair Bolsonaro, cried foul after polling was extended nationwide for two hours, at Lula's request, due to transport problems in some cities. Though Bolsonaro maintained that he will seek annulment of the presidential election, his party later distanced itself from that position and opted to accept the official vote. "We recognize the presidential election results, as proclaimed by the Superior Electoral Court (TSE), but we believe that the concerns raised need to be sufficiently addressed within a balanced and d

Sitting outside his small shop in a warren of alleyways in Rawalpindi, Ahsan Shakeel buffed an antique brass pot to a high shine, pressing it against a mechanised wheel.

“We’ve removed all the dents, but it still needs polishing,” the 72-year-old restorer, among the last still practising his craft, told AFP as the spinning buffer sent fine metal dust into the air.

Quitting a job as a hotel cook, Shakeel followed in his father’s footsteps to become an antiques restorer, opening his workshop in the Bhabra Bazaar market in densely populated Rawalpindi in 1980.

Today, he is one of the last master restorers preserving antique metalware in Pakistan.

Rawalpindi’s roots stretch back to prehistoric human settlements and over centuries the garrison city evolved into a major commercial hub where metalcraft from the Mughal and British colonial periods converged.

Moving inside his shop, Shakeel navigated wall-to-wall shelves stacked with centuries-old ewer jugs, samovars for boiling, dishes, jars and teapots, most of which were made of copper or brass.

He took down various items and enthusiastically explained to AFP their materials and origins.

The vintage items are now increasingly rare in the modern era in which they have been replaced by stainless steel and plastic kitchenware.

“I used to travel everywhere, Lahore, Gujranwala, Karachi, back and forth (to purchase antiques),” he said.

‘Life back into the dead’

Shakeel procures the items he restores mostly from scrap yards, ports, or household clearances.

“Often, the condition of the items is so bad that no one would buy them,” he said.

The shop owner and his colleague Shakeel Ahmed restore the battered items by hammering out dents, re-tinning the interiors over coal fires, and polishing the metal. A badly damaged item could take a few days to fix.

After restoration, a piece can sell between $100 and $1,000. Shakeel’s customers are mostly collectors or antique enthusiasts, including foreigners.

Today, he mostly relies on online platforms and messaging applications to buy and sell antiques.

“I don’t have the same health anymore, so I travel less,” he said.

Prices for antiques are on the increase but the number of customers has fallen over time, Shakeel said.

“The money doesn’t turn over quickly in this business. It’s a very slow trade,” he said.

“Customers who still exist, they are not many. They collect these things because they understand these items. Those who don’t understand them would think it’s all useless,” Shakeel added.

Ahmed said he enjoyed restoring worn and damaged objects because they carry stories within them from different communities in the past or historical periods.

“This is a very old thing,” the 56-year-old man said at his own dimly lit workshop, as he gently used a small hammer to smooth out little dents on a large brass hookah pipe for smoking tobacco.

“What we do is like putting life back into the dead,” Ahmed said.

Header image: Antique dealer Ahsan Shakeel shows an artefact at his shop selling vintage items in Rawalpindi on October 20, 2026. —AFP

The Jordanian military said it had struck “terrorist organisations” in neighbouring Syria on Monday in retaliation for a deadly attack on a church last week, hours after authorities arrested three men they accused of the killings.

It said air force jets had “destroyed several terrorist positions” and killed and wounded “numerous members” of groups linked to the perpetrators of the church attack.

Syrian authorities reported civilian casualties from the raids, with health officials in Daraa province saying six people, including three children and a woman, were killed.

Syria’s civil defence agency reported seven deaths in total, six people in Daraa and one in neighbouring Sweida province.

On Friday, gunmen killed nine people during a funeral service at the Greek Orthodox St George’s Church in the village of Hammoud in Karak governorate, southern Jordan.

Karak is home to a significant Christian community in Muslim-majority Jordan, where Christians make up between two and three per cent of the population.

Major General Abdullah al-Maaytah, Jordan’s director of public security, on Monday named the three detained suspects as Hazza Zaidan Mohammed, Meshal Zaidan Mohammed and Ahmad Sami Hussein.

The trio, two of them brothers and the other related by marriage, were cornered at an abandoned house where they had barricaded themselves inside and opened fire on security forces.

“All three terrorists have been injured. They have been taken to hospital and are still receiving treatment,” Maaytah told a press conference.

‘We will show them’

One of the suspects was in critical condition, Jordan’s state broadcaster Al-Mamlaka reported. There were no casualties among the security forces, it added.

“This country must remain an oasis of security and stability, and we affirm that Jordan will remain impervious to anyone who dares to challenge it,” Maaytah said.

Under Jordanian law, murder is punishable by death by hanging.

A number of weapons and a large quantity of ammunition were seized from the three suspects, the Public Security Directorate said.

Jordan’s King Abdullah II said in a post on X that security forces “chased them to the very end”.

“We vowed the terrorists would not escape punishment, and no proponent of dark ideologies that divide Jordanians will be tolerated,” he wrote.

Earlier, the king visited wounded victims of the church attack in hospital, dressed in military fatigues and carrying a pistol on his hip.

“We will show them,” he vowed.

Interior Minister Mazen al-Faraya told Al-Mamlaka on Monday that the attackers were all Jordanians and “had been holed up in a building in one of the villages near the site of the attack”.

“There is no indication of any external contacts or collaboration with foreign parties,” he said.

Government communications minister Mohammad al-Momani said “we stand ready and will strike with an iron fist, without mercy or leniency, against anyone who attempts to undermine Jordan’s security”.

Attacks on houses of worship in Jordan are rare. In 2016 an attack in Karak targeted a security centre and police patrols, leaving 10 people dead.

On Friday, Prime Minister Jafar Hassan ordered a three-day period of national mourning for the victims of the church attack, with flags to be flown at half-mast over government and public institutions.

Eight of the nine victims were laid to rest on Sunday next to the church in a funeral that drew a huge crowd amid a large security presence, AFP images showed.

The ninth person, Mohammed al-Qasous, was buried in south Amman on Monday.

Su serie Ashita no Joe, publicada en las décadas de 1960 y 1970 narraba la historia de un joven problemático que aprendía a boxear en un centro de detención de menores y ascendía en el mundo del boxeo profesional hasta protagonizar combates memorables Leer

L'ancien directeur du Bureau fédéral d'enquête (FBI) James Comey a été inculpé, lundi 26 octobre, pour avoir supposément fait fuiter des informations classées secret défense, la troisième procédure judiciaire intentée contre ce critique de Donald Trump.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, fighting for his political life, scrambled to bring out his base on Tuesday as Israelis voted in record numbers in the country’s first election since the Oct 7, 2023 attack.

With Israeli Arabs voters turning out in strong numbers, Netanyahu raised fears that leaders of the minority group were out to “steal the election” and reverse the hardline Jewish nationalist direction in which his government has taken the country.

The first exit polls showed the opposition bloc with a slight edge over Netanyahu’s camp as voting ended, but still shy of an outright majority in the 120-seat Knesset.

The country’s main pollsters — Channels 11, 12 and 13 — projected the opposition bloc to win 52 or 53 seats, and Netanyahu’s bloc to win 50, although his Likud would be the largest single party in the parliament, with 24 or 25 seats.

Netanyahu’s Likud Party also unsuccessfully asked election authorities to keep polls open past 10pm (1am PKT), as the opposition charged that he was looking for pretexts to challenge the results.

“We cannot leave this battle here in the hands of the left and the Arab parties that want to bring an end to the Jewish state,” a visibly tense Netanyahu told supporters as he tried to bring up turnout in a Likud stronghold.

“So no barbecues, don’t go to the beach — go to the polling station and vote Likud,” he said.

Nationwide turnout as of 6:00pm was 66.7 per cent, the highest at that point in the day since such statistics were first recorded in 1973, the Central Elections Committee said.

Israelis are casting their ballots in the shadow of Oct 7 and the multi-front regional wars that it sparked, with the trauma from the attack still fresh and questions over accountability and security central to the campaign.

The close-fought vote comes as Israel looks increasingly isolated on the world stage, driven by the war in Iran and the devastating military campaign in Gaza, soaring settlement construction and violence in the occupied West Bank.

In the years since Oct 7, 2023, Netanyahu led multiple wars that have seen Israeli forces reduce Gaza to rubble, occupy southern Lebanon and pummel Iran with US help.

The last opinion polls to be published showed Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, running neck and neck with his main rival Gadi Eisenkot, a political novice and former military chief.

Eisenkot has vowed to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state and expressed support for Israeli settlements, but has promised to crack down on violent settlers.

Before voting, the 66-year-old Eisenkot paid his respects privately at the grave of his son Gal, whose death fighting in Gaza has drawn empathy from many Israelis.

Speaking afterwards at a polling station, Eisenkot called on Israelis to vote to replace “the worst government since the state was established”.

Arab minority in spotlight

Some 7.3 million people are eligible to vote, with tens of thousands of Israelis estimated to have flown in from abroad for an election seen as crucial to deciding the future character of their country.

Eilana Zisblit, 55, told AFP she had travelled back from Canada, where she has lived for almost 30 years, to vote for a centre-right party in Eisenkot’s bloc.

“The country is going in a really, really bad direction. Both for Jews and Arabs living in the country, and for Jews living abroad,” she said.

The time to act is “now, or the country really won’t survive anymore”.

Turnout appeared to be unusually high among Israeli Arabs and in east Jerusalem.

Netanyahu, 77, has served as prime minister on and off for more than 19 years.

Throughout his career, he has repeatedly raised the spectre of Arab voters as a threat.

He warned on Tuesday of Arabs voting by the busload, writing on social media that Israel could wake up to a “government of the left wing and Muslim Brotherhood”.

Netanyahu said that three senior officials of the United Arab List had been arrested with envelopes full of cash in the south.

The acting director general of the Central Elections Committee, Dean Livne, said that police had “caught individuals who tried to bribe voters”, adding that the unidentified suspects were not at polling stations and were caught near their homes.

He said the matter was a localised case and under investigation.

United Arab List head Mansour Abbas, who could emerge as a kingmaker in a close election, accused Netanyahu of “lying and inciting” to mobilise his voters.

In Tel Aviv, left-wing party The Democrats, which is part of Eisenkot’s opposition bloc, said police had arrested a man with a knife who had moved threateningly towards its leader Yair Golan.

“Incitement and violence will not intimidate us,” Golan said in a statement, blaming the incident on the “poison machine” of Netanyahu.

Trump endorsement

Netanyahu returned to power in December 2022, bringing into his coalition far-right ultra-nationalists who have since seen their political clout skyrocket.

Seeking to unseat the premier is an informal bloc of parties led by Eisenkot’s Yashar party and spanning from the right to the centre-left — including former prime ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, as well as seasoned politician Avigdor Lieberman and left-leaning Golan.

The Arab minority accounts for some 21pc of the population, but Eisenkot has been coy on whether he would ally with their lawmakers to wrest power from Netanyahu.

Netanyahu has cast himself as the only person who can keep Israel safe.

In the last days of the campaign, he posted an image of a nuclear bomb destroying Tel Aviv and talked up his endorsement by US President Donald Trump, who is also fond of alleging election fraud.

Le parti du candidat conservateur Flavio Bolsonaro a reconnu lundi 26 octobre la réélection surprise du président Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva à la tête du Brésil, à l'issue d'un scrutin que Donald Trump a qualifié de « truqué ».