Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has seized on the discovery of the sunken Altalena — an arms ship that nearly sparked a civil war in 1948 — as a rallying point ahead of legislative elections scheduled for October 27. The ship was located on August 24 at a depth of 503 metres off Israel's Mediterranean coast, 76 years after it was fired upon and sunk by orders of founding Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion during a confrontation with the right-wing Irgun militia; the incident killed 16 Irgun members and three soldiers. Critics, including the left-leaning newspaper Haaretz and prominent historians, have condemned Netanyahu's enthusiastic embrace of the discovery as a calculated pre-election stunt designed to revive old grievances between Israel's right and left and distract from his own record.