By 2 p.m. on October 27, 3,290,480 of Israel’s 7,331,981 eligible voters had cast a ballot for the 26th Knesset — 44.9%, against 38.9% at the same hour in 2022, according to Israel’s Central Elections Committee. The gap held all day: 16.7% by 10 a.m. against 15.9% in 2022, 31.5% by noon against 28.4%, 55.7% by 4 p.m. against 47.5%, 66.7% by 6 p.m. against 57.7%. Israel’s final 2022 turnout was 70.63%. Al Jazeera called the 2 p.m. figure, as reported, the highest at that hour in 50 years; the Times of Israel, citing the same committee, put the prior record for that hour at 1988, 38 years earlier and 2.7 points lower, while other outlets measuring the same moment split between 1973 and 1977 for the last time Israelis voted this fast. The committee’s percentage is the fixed point; how many decades back you have to go for a comparison depends on which hour you pick and who’s rounding.

The Knesset’s 120 seats are allocated by closed-list proportional representation counted nationally, with a 3.25% threshold a party must clear to win any seats at all. That threshold is a share of the valid vote, not a fixed count, so a bigger electorate raises the number of votes a borderline party needs to survive. Several small parties were polling close to that line going into Tuesday, which is why record turnout is more than a mood: it can delete a party from the Knesset, and with it, whichever bloc that party would have joined.

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister with 19 years in office across multiple terms, called the morning’s pace an “emergency” on X, writing that right-wing voters had stayed home while “huge lines” had formed in Arab towns: “My brothers and sisters, right-wing voters, if we don’t go out to vote, we’ll get a government of the Muslim Brotherhood.” By noon, as Newsweek’s Ellie Cook reported, more than 2.3 million Israelis had voted — more in that window than in any election since 1977 — and 30% of eligible soldiers had voted by 10 a.m., up from 25.7% in 2022; ynetnews later put the comparable soldier figure at 48% by 1 p.m., against 44.4% at the same hour in the prior election. The Central Elections Committee changed its own procedure mid-day, letting poll workers identify the next voter in line before the current one had finished behind the booth, to keep queues moving — then rejected a bid from Likud, Shas and Amcha Yisrael to extend voting past 10 p.m., finding, the Times of Israel reported, “no justification,” while granting one extension, to a Hebron-area settlement site that had lost power.

Envelopes of cash, and two stories about who is stealing the vote

Overnight, police arrested three residents of the Negev towns of Shaqib al-Salam and Ar’ara on suspicion of trying to buy votes for the United Arab List, known as Ra’am. Searches of their homes turned up envelopes holding tens of thousands of shekels in cash alongside Ra’am ballot slips, JNS reported. Netanyahu posted on X that the arrests showed a “serious incident” and demanded an investigation, and in a separate post told supporters Arab parties were “trying to steal the election,” warning that Israel could not leave the outcome to “the left and the Arab parties that want to bring an end to the Jewish state.” Ra’am denied wrongdoing, the Jerusalem Post reported, saying the suspects were detained at home four hours before polls opened, nowhere near a ballot box, and calling the arrests “baseless... intended to undermine Ra’am and suppress voter turnout within Arab society” under National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s police. The committee’s acting director-general, Dean Livne, called the case “unusual” but said police had caught the suspects before anyone reached a polling station and that “there are no similar incidents of this kind across the country; this was a localized case” — a description that sits awkwardly next to a national claim about a stolen election.

Netanyahu’s challenger is Gadi Eisenkot, the former IDF chief of staff who joined the war cabinet after October 7 and quit it eight months later over Netanyahu’s handling of the war, and now leads the Yashar party. The final pre-election polls, published Friday by Israel’s three main broadcasters, agreed on one number and split on another: all three put Netanyahu’s bloc of right-wing, far-right and ultra-Orthodox parties at exactly 50 seats, and all three put his combined opponents short of the 61 needed to govern — but by how much depended on the channel.

None of the three scenarios hands Eisenkot’s bloc a majority without the Arab parties Ra’am and the Joint List, credited with a combined 14 to 16 seats across the three polls. Eisenkot has ruled out governing with them, citing “a lack of shared values,” which leaves a minority government propped up from outside by Arab lawmakers who vote to remove Netanyahu without joining his successor’s cabinet as the likeliest route anyone has found to unseat him — a dynamic that Benny Gantz’s exit from the race left even starker by shrinking the field of Jewish-led alternatives.

Israel’s roughly 2.1 million Arab citizens — Palestinian by heritage, Israeli by citizenship — make up about 21% of the population but only 18% of the electorate, because the community is younger on average and some residents of annexed East Jerusalem have no citizenship and cannot vote at all. Their turnout was 53.2% in 2022. Mansour Abbas, Ra’am’s leader, told Reuters that high turnout this year could “ensure the formation of a new government of change,” while pollsters cited by Newsweek put the 2026 projection as high as 70%. Organizers had pushed for months to reach the community’s highest turnout since 1999.

The vote is the first parliamentary test since the October 7, 2023 attacks, in which Hamas killed 1,200 people and took 251 hostage, and since the wars that followed. Gaza’s health authorities say Israel’s offensive there has killed more than 74,000 people, under a year-old US-brokered ceasefire that leaves Israel occupying roughly two-thirds of the enclave. Israel also fought Hezbollah in Lebanon and, in February, had warplanes drop more than 500 bombs on Iranian targets in a single day, Newsweek reported, part of a campaign that began with a 12-day air war on Iran’s nuclear sites in 2025 and that President Donald Trump, Netanyahu’s ally in the fight, has urged him to “finish.” Eisenkot, who campaigned at Kibbutz Nir Oz with freed hostage Gadi Mozes, has promised a national inquiry into October 7’s security failures, which Netanyahu’s government has resisted, and has pledged to dismantle Hamas’s military and governing power within 18 months of taking office. He has also criticized the settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank that has risen since 2023, while opposing the far-right coalition partners who back it.

Between 600,000 and 650,000 soldiers, reservists and displaced residents are expected to vote by the “double envelope” method that keeps their ballots separate for later verification, ynetnews reported, enough to swing an estimated 15 seats once they’re opened — a count that won’t finish before Thursday afternoon. “My expectation is that we will have only a slight majority either way. No landslide,” the Shalom Hartman Institute’s Amotz Asa-El told the Kathmandu Post. If neither bloc reaches 61 seats once those envelopes are counted, Netanyahu — forced from office only once since 2009, and back within eighteen months — stays on as caretaker while the bargaining starts.