Ehud Barak, the leader of One Israel, formerly Labour, has surged to a 9-point lead over Mr Netanyahu, but there is a saying in Israeli politics that Mr Barak’s party “wins with the pollsters and loses at the polls”.
Three years ago Mr Netanyahu won the election – by 30,000 out of three million votes – after Islamic Palestinian bombers killed almost a hundred Israelis in the months before the election. In the days before the election on 17 May, all parties are campaigning desperately because the outcome is still uncertain. A powerful religious party attacks Russian Jewish immigrants for importing call girls, eating pork and building Christian churches. A known forgery is used by Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister, to show that his chief rival intends to give up east Jerusalem.

THE ISRAELI election campaign is cheap and vicious and will probably get worse. Frank Keating, the Oklahoma Governor, said: “We will do all that we can, but for many people we are simply not going to be able to make their lives whole again.”. Thereafter, the long clean- up will begin.Already the cost of insurance claims is expected to top $260m (pounds 162m) in this city alone. Dennis McCarthy of the National Weather Service in nearby Norman said: “With a storm of this intensity and this magnitude, sometimes even if you do the right things, you just don’t have enough shelter.”Officials said yesterday it would be at least another day before all the areas worst hit would be open to residents. “They said it was going to hit my house at 7.11, and damn if my roof didn’t blow off at 7.11,” he said.But for some, the ferocity of this storm meant that there was no means of escaping it.

Without the warnings, assisted by Doppler Radar technology, fewer residents would have made it into shelters or found sanctuary.John Clabes, spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration, has a home that took a direct hit on Monday He marvelled at the predictions on television. Camera crews followed the main funnel cloud that formed about 45 miles south-west of Moore right into the metropolis. “We had debris that was flying 10 to 15 miles from its original location, so it’s possible that a victim could have been carried for miles too.”Officials praised the early warnings issued by the federal and local weather services relayed to residents by television and radio stations. The grisly truth is that among the 38 who died in the Oklahoma City area, many will have been swept long distances.”We have a lot of open spaces the tornado travelled through,” said Sergeant Nate Tarver of the Oklahoma City police.

A school bus was taken aloft and dumped upside down two blocks away. A horse that had been grazing in an open field was found dead in the car park of a school. Among those who survived but suffered terrible injuries was a man who stumbled into a local hospital with a tree branch jammed through his thigh.One measure of the force of the tornadoes was the distances travelled by some of what it scooped up. Several hours later, rescuers found him in a nearby tree, alive. One mother fought to hold her 10-month-old in her arms as the twister engulfed her She could not keep hold, however, and the baby vanished.