Israel’s polling stations opened at seven in the morning on Tuesday, October 27, and they close at ten at night. Some 7.3 million people are eligible to vote, about 1.2 million of them Palestinian citizens of Israel. There is no general absentee ballot, so an Israeli who happens to be abroad cannot take part. The only exceptions are diplomats and state emissaries, who voted at their missions on October 20, as Edna Mohamed explains for Al Jazeera.
All 120 seats of the Knesset are being contested. It is the first election since the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023, and Al Jazeera’s guide to the possible outcomes says it could end Benjamin Netanyahu’s long hold on power. Since that October Israel has waged what Al Jazeera calls a genocidal war on Gaza. It has also carried out attacks on Iran, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Qatar, as Simon Speakman Cordall writes on the morning of the vote. The campaign has pulled the country to the right. After three years of fighting, the country has one evening of counting.
The tie
The opinion polls have Netanyahu’s bloc and the opposition, led by the former chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot, almost exactly level. The final television polls, published on Friday and summarised by the Times of Israel, put Eisenkot’s Yashar first with 22 seats on Kan, 23 on Channel 12 and 22 on Channel 13. Likud had 20, 21 and 19. Naftali Bennett’s Together had 14, 15 and 14. All three surveys gave Netanyahu’s right-wing and religious bloc 50 seats and the opposition between 52 and 56, with Arab-led parties at 14 to 16 between them. None of these numbers reaches 61.
With the arithmetic stuck, the campaign has moved onto screens. Cordall described a contest of social media advertisements and doctored AI videos. Each camp shows a grim picture of the Israel its rivals would build, and the picture changes depending on whether the party making it sits on the right or in the centre. Rews has already written about the bots in this campaign, and about Donald Trump’s endorsement of Netanyahu from Washington.
One reflection, offered as no more than that: a government that has held power for a long time tends to stop running against its opponents and start running against the country it says they would create. Here both sides appear to have picked up the habit.
What nobody disputes
The election is often called the most consequential in Israel’s history. Yet in Cordall’s survey of where the candidates stand, many of the questions an outsider would expect to divide them turn out to be matters of agreement. None of the leading contenders has questioned the case for the war on Gaza after October 7, which Al Jazeera describes as genocide, or for the wars that followed, including the one on Iran. Most of the candidates for prime minister have offered no clear route to the two-state solution envisaged in the 1990s. Nor have they offered one to a fair settlement with the Palestinians whose land Israel occupies. Netanyahu himself has called toppling Tehran’s government his “primary objective”.
The arguments are about other things: the courts, conscription, the security failures of October 7, the handling of the captives, the corruption allegations against the prime minister, and military service for the ultra-Orthodox.
The war is not on the ballot. Only who runs it is.
Deir el-Balah
The people with the most at stake have no vote. Maram Humaid, reporting from Deir el-Balah, found Palestinians in Gaza following the campaign with fear and uncertainty after three years of war. Gaza has been under a “ceasefire” since October 2025, and Al Jazeera puts the word in quotation marks. Under it there are Israeli air strikes almost every day, living conditions remain dire, and a punishing siege keeps basic goods in short supply. For them the question is not who wins but whether anything will change.
The hill above Majd al-Krum
Inside Israel’s own borders, too, some people are waiting for the result with dread. Above the village of Majd al-Krum in Galilee is a hilltop covered in pines called al-Rus. Settlers from the occupied West Bank began building an outpost there on village land, Al Jazeera reports. It was one of the first such attempts on the Israeli side of the Green Line, the boundary between Israel and the occupied West Bank.
The police closed the road up the hill. From September 13 the villagers, Palestinian citizens of Israel, climbed it anyway, on horseback, in off-road vehicles and on foot. Their protests drove the settlers out. They now fear that if the far right wins, they will be the next target. In the West Bank, Al Jazeera reports, the pogroms have escalated.
The arithmetic of waiting
A government needs 61 of the 120 seats. Seats are shared out in proportion to the national vote, and a party needs at least 3.25 percent to enter the Knesset. About a dozen parties have a chance of getting over that bar, which slows both the count and the allocation of seats. Exit polls follow the closing of the polls, the Central Elections Committee posts results through the night, the final count is expected by Friday, and the official results are published on November 4.
After that, President Isaac Herzog consults the party leaders and chooses the candidate he thinks most likely to form a government. That candidate gets up to 42 days. No Israeli party has ever won a majority on its own, and coalition talks often go on for weeks. A minority government or a rotating premiership is possible.
If no government emerges, Netanyahu’s cabinet stays on as a caretaker, and if every attempt fails the country goes back to the polls. So even if the vote goes against him, the man whose hold on power is said to be slipping keeps the office for as long as nobody else can put a coalition together.