At 10pm on Tuesday, Israel’s main television networks released exit polls putting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc at 50 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, against 52 to 53 for the bloc led by his main challenger, the former military chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot, and 17 to 18 for Israel’s Arab-led parties, as Al Jazeera reported. Sixty-one seats form a government. Nobody was close. By 2:17am, Channel 12’s revised poll had moved to 52 for Netanyahu against 49 for the opposition; Channel 13 and Kan 11 showed the two blocs tied at 51-51, CNBC reported. An exit poll is a survey of people as they leave the booth, not a count of ballots, and on a night this close the margin of error in that survey is bigger than the margin between the parties.
An exit poll’s seat breakdown by party gives a sharper picture than the bloc totals. Channel 12’s poll, as published by the Independent, had Netanyahu’s Likud as the largest single party at 24 seats, followed by Eisenkot’s Yashar at 22, Naftali Bennett’s B’Yaschad at 12, the Joint List at 11, the Democrats and Yisrael Beytenu at 9 each, Shas at 8, Ra’am at 7, and Otzma Yehudit, Religious Zionism and United Torah Judaism at 6 apiece — eleven parties splitting 120 seats, none of them within reach of a majority alone.
How the count moved
The exit poll numbers were superseded within hours, and kept moving as ballots were tallied. With 41% of votes counted, Netanyahu’s bloc stood at 57 seats, four short of a majority; by 66%, it had slipped to 54. With 65% counted on Wednesday morning, Likud held at 27 seats, still the largest party, with Netanyahu’s bloc at 54, Eisenkot’s bloc at 48, and the Arab-led parties up to 18, according to Ynet’s running count. CNN’s tally, taken from Channel 12 and Ynet with just over half the votes in, put Netanyahu’s bloc at 55 — which CNN described as a drop from a 68-seat governing coalition in the outgoing Knesset. That outgoing-coalition figure is higher than the 64 seats Netanyahu’s bloc won outright in the 2022 election; the gap suggests the coalition picked up a few extra lawmakers somewhere over the term, through defections or new alliances, rather than a discrepancy in how the two tallies were taken.
| Netanyahu bloc seats (seats) | |
|---|---|
| Exit poll, 10pm | 50 |
| Exit poll, 2am | 52 |
| Count at 41% | 57 |
| Count at 66% | 54 |
| 2022 final result | 64 |
Source: Channel 12/Ynet exit polls and vote counts (2026); Central Elections Committee certified result (2022). 2022 figure is the certified final result; the 2026 points are exit-poll and partial-count projections, not certified totals.
Turnout drove both the volatility and the stakes. Reuters reported that more than 74% of Israel’s roughly 7 million eligible voters had cast ballots by 8pm, eight points above the 2022 election at the same hour. By the official 10pm close, turnout reached 77.7%, the highest in a Knesset election since 1999 — 27 years — according to CNBC’s report of the Central Elections Committee’s figures. That number is still provisional: voters already in line at 10pm were allowed to finish voting, and roughly 650,000 special “double envelope” ballots — cast by soldiers, diplomats, hospital patients and others voting outside their registered precinct — have yet to be added, Ynet reported. Those ballots alone are around 11% of all votes cast this year, a record share. Historically they have tended to add seats to Zionist parties across the political spectrum at the expense of the Arab-led Joint List and Ra’am and the ultra-Orthodox Shas and United Torah Judaism, the Israel Democracy Institute has found — which, if the pattern holds, would work against the very parties the overnight count has been favoring.
The most consequential turnout swing came from Palestinian citizens of Israel, about 20% of the population, who have historically voted at lower rates than Jewish Israelis. Al Jazeera’s early indicators put turnout in Arab communities at around 80% this year, the highest on record, and the Joint List and Ra’am were projected at a combined 16 to 19 seats depending on the poll and the stage of the count — their strongest showing in Israeli history. Enough seats, in theory, to put either bloc over 61. Neither bloc has agreed to use them that way.
The arithmetic nobody will do
Netanyahu, speaking at Likud headquarters, said the night had shown two things: “Likud is the largest party in Israel. There is no dispute about that,” and that “the right-wing bloc has a clear, decisive majority among the Zionist and Jewish public.” He added that “Israel must not be endangered with a government that relies on anti-Zionist Arab parties.” Eisenkot, who lost a son and two nephews in the Gaza war and led Netanyahu’s war cabinet for eight months before quitting over his leadership, called the projections “a total lack of confidence in Netanyahu and the ‘October 7th government’” and said a “worthy leader” would have already announced his retirement. Opposition leader Yair Lapid went further: “Don’t let anyone confuse you: the Netanyahu bloc has suffered a crushing defeat. This is a total collapse and the public has told them to go home.”
But Eisenkot’s own path to 61 runs through conditions most Arab lawmakers reject — recognizing Israel as a Jewish state and declaring Hamas a terrorist organization to be dismantled — and two of his allies, Avigdor Liberman and Naftali Bennett, have ruled out governing with Arab parties regardless. Ra’am’s Mansour Abbas said during voting that “our vote will change the government”; whether that happens depends on opposition leaders breaking a campaign promise, which has ample precedent in Israeli coalition politics but no guarantee this time. Four opposition parties had already agreed before the vote that Netanyahu had to go, without agreeing on how to get there, and Benny Gantz’s withdrawal from the race left the Arab-led parties as the likeliest kingmakers well before the first exit poll aired.
This was Israel’s first national election since Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack, in which 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage, and since the wars in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran that followed, framed by Netanyahu’s opponents as a referendum on the security failures of that day and by Netanyahu as a vote on whether to let him finish the campaigns he started. He has served as prime minister for nearly 19 of the past 30 years and survived four inconclusive elections between 2019 and 2022 before returning to office; he also faces an ongoing corruption trial he denies, and an International Criminal Court warrant, issued in November 2024, alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, which Israel is appealing. President Trump endorsed him anyway, writing that if Israel had “the wrong leader” he would not be inclined to keep backing the Iran campaign the two launched jointly eight months ago.
The provisional nationwide count, including the double-envelope ballots, is expected to be finished by Friday; the certified official result follows on November 4, a week after polling day. That is when Israel’s president begins asking party leaders whether they can reach 61 — not necessarily the leader of the single largest party, but whoever can actually assemble the votes. One early count of the night already showed the exit polls’ verdict reversing as real ballots replaced projections; whether that reversal survives the double-envelope count, or whether neither bloc ever reaches 61 and Israel heads toward a seventh election in eight years, is the number still to be filled in.