Arch-hawk Ariel Sharon looked set yesterday for a crushing election victory over Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, still far behind in opinion polls a day before the vote.
But a Palestinian leader said there would be no point in Middle East peace talks if Sharon won.
"I do not believe that Palestinians have to contact Sharon or to negotiate with him," Marwan Barghouthi, a leader of the mainstream Fatah movement in the West Bank, said.
PHOTO: AP
"The best way to deal with Sharon, the only way to deal with Sharon is the Intifada and the resistance," he said.
A Gallup poll in the Maariv daily showed 55 percent of voters picking the rightwing Likud leader and 35 percent favoring his Labour party rival, widening the gap by two points since Friday.
Barak narrowed the margin by three percent in a Dahaf Institute poll in Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, but it still predicted that Sharon would trounce him 56 percent to 38.
A survey released on Sunday by US pollster John Zogby had Sharon with a commanding 26-point lead, 60 percent to Barak's 34 percent. His poll found that 72 percent of Israeli voters felt Barak had managed the country badly in his 18-month tenure.
"In his short term in office, Barak succeeded in losing the confidence of a wide range of Israeli voters," Zogby said.
Barak, 58, under fire for failing to make peace or quell a Palestinian revolt against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, has shrugged off the polls, saying today's vote is the only one that counts.
He has rejected all talk of joining a Sharon-led unity government and urged voters to choose between war and peace.
"We are being called to decide whether between us and peace there is another blood-filled war," the embattled prime minister wrote in a column published in Yedioth Ahronoth yesterday.
He has desperately tried to rally traditional leftwing supporters, Russian immigrants and Israeli Arabs, still smarting from the deaths of 13 of their number in October during protests in support of the Palestinian Intifada, or uprising.
Barak's aggressive electioneering has contrasted sharply with the low-key campaign run by Sharon, who seems confident that victory is assured and is reluctant to risk a wrong move.
Many voters believe that Sharon, the most hated Israeli in the Arab world, will take tough action to deal with the violence that has overshadowed the two-month election campaign.
The Palestinian Islamic Jihad group vowed yesterday to launch attacks on Israel after soldiers shot dead one of its bombers as he tried to infiltrate from the Gaza Strip.
In a statement, it said Shadi al-Kahlout had been on a mission with a 15kg bomb when he was killed late on Saturday. "Our operations will continue and increase. We will carry out powerful blows against the criminal entity [Israel] within the coming few days," it added.
The Israeli army said it shot Kahlout as he tried to scale a border fence carrying the bomb. Thousands of Palestinians were expected to march at his funeral yesterday.
Islamic Jihad opposes Palestinian-Israeli peace moves and has in the past claimed responsibility for suicide bombings in which scores of Israelis have been killed or wounded.
In an appearance on a political chat show on Sunday, Barak defended his handling of the peace talks which confronted emotive issues like Jerusalem, Jewish settlements and refugees.
"I stand my ground, look reality in the eye, remove the mask from [Palestinian President Yasser] Arafat, remove the filters from the eyes of Israelis and I am ready to weigh ground-breaking ideas [for peace]," Barak said.
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