Israel voted on Tuesday in its first election since the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, and delivered the one result neither major camp wanted: no winner. Exit polls published as voting ended showed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc and the opposition bloc led by former military chief Gadi Eisenkot locked together, both far short of the 61 seats needed to govern the 120-seat Knesset. Netanyahu called for a strong right-wing national government, while Eisenkot said the public had voted against the longtime leader and called on him to retire from politics. Neither man claimed victory, because the arithmetic gave neither man anything to claim.
The deadlock was remarkably consistent across the broadcasters. Kan 11 and Channel 13 both projected the two blocs tied at 51 seats each, while Channel 12 gave Netanyahu’s Likud-led bloc a narrow 52-to-49 edge. Netanyahu’s Likud remained the largest single party in every projection, on roughly 24 to 25 seats — but that is a steep fall from the 32 seats Likud holds in the outgoing Knesset. A party can finish first in Israel and still lose the only contest that matters, which is the race to assemble 61.
A Record Turnout Delivers a Split Verdict
What makes the result striking is how many Israelis turned out to produce it. Turnout reached 77.7 percent when polls closed, according to the Central Elections Committee — the highest in more than two decades, with some 5.7 million ballots cast out of about 7.3 million eligible voters. This was not an apathetic electorate staying home. Israelis voted in numbers not seen since the turn of the century, for the country’s 26th Knesset, and used that record participation to deny both blocs a majority.
As real ballots replaced projections overnight, the picture shifted without resolving. A Central Elections Committee partial count, with 55.4 percent of polling stations tallied, put Netanyahu’s bloc ahead on 56 seats against 49 for Eisenkot’s bloc and 15 for the Arab parties, with Likud on 27 seats and Eisenkot’s Yashar on 21. Later projections with more than 70 percent counted had Netanyahu’s bloc lower, around 54 seats — still a collapse from the 68-seat coalition he led into the election. The remaining count, including the double-envelope ballots of soldiers and diplomats, will take days to complete.
The Night’s Real Story: The Arab Parties
Outside the two blocs, the election produced one clear surge. Arab parties, which sit outside both camps, were projected to win between 16 and 18 seats — a huge increase that makes them the holders of the balance of power in the new Knesset. The Joint List alone was tracking around 11 seats in the partial count. In a parliament where both blocs stall near 50, a unified Arab representation of that size is not a footnote; it is the fulcrum on which the next government will either be built or fail to be built.
That is precisely the problem for Eisenkot. The former chief of staff, whose Yashar party is the largest in the opposition at around 21 to 22 seats, has all but ruled out forming a government with the Arab parties. His bloc’s apparent lead in the exit polls — 52 to 53 seats in most projections — is therefore a lead without an obvious road to 61. Opposition leader Yair Lapid declared that Netanyahu’s bloc had suffered a tough defeat and a total collapse, but celebration in the opposition camp kept colliding with the same question: a majority against Netanyahu is not the same thing as a majority for an alternative government.
Why Deadlock May Favour the Incumbent
Netanyahu, meanwhile, holds one structural advantage: he stays in office while everyone else negotiates. As caretaker prime minister, he remains in the Prime Minister’s Office through what are likely to be prolonged coalition talks, and his own demand — a strong, right-wing national government — is aimed at peeling partners toward his bloc rather than conceding the field. His far-right and religious partners, the parties led by Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, were projected to take a combined 13 or so seats inside his bloc, with no major gains for either. That limits his room to grow, but it also means his base held together while his overall coalition shrank.
He also campaigned with open backing from Washington. President Donald Trump endorsed Netanyahu in the closing stretch of the race, a fact Fox News was highlighting as polls closed, and the American president’s support remains one of the prime minister’s central arguments to his own camp: that only he manages the relationship Israel depends on most. Whether that argument still moves coalition partners, rather than voters, is what the coming weeks will test. Endorsements do not add Knesset seats, but in a negotiation among party leaders, perceived American preference is a currency of its own.
What Happens Next
Israel now enters the familiar machinery of coalition formation, with an unusually even split to feed into it. Once the final results are certified, the president will consult party leaders and hand one of them — most plausibly Netanyahu or Eisenkot — a mandate to form a government, with a fixed window to negotiate and the possibility of an extension. Parties opposed to Netanyahu may hold a majority of seats between them, but they span right, left, centre, and the Jewish-Arab divide, and assembling them into one cabinet is a different exercise from defeating an incumbent. Every small party near the 3.25 percent electoral threshold, and every late-counted envelope, can still redraw the map.
The honest summary of election night is that Israel tested whether it is ready to part ways with its longest-serving prime minister, and answered: not decisively. Likud lost a quarter of its seats, its coalition lost far more, and the opposition finished ahead in most exit polls — yet the challenger starts the negotiation further from a workable coalition than the headline numbers suggest. Weeks of wrangling are the optimistic scenario; another election is a real one. The voters have spoken at record volume. What they have said, so far, is deadlock.
Source: Fox News Clips
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