Israeli Election Leaves Netanyahu and Challenger Eisenkot Deadlocked, Arab Parties Holding the Balance

Israelis went to the polls on Tuesday in the first national election since the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023, and exit polls broadcast as voting ended showed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's governing bloc and the opposition led by former armed-forces chief Gadi Eisenkot locked in a near-tie, with neither side close to the 61 seats needed to control the 120-member Knesset.

Turnout reached roughly 77.7%, the highest in a Knesset election since 1999, according to figures reported by the Times of Israel's election-night coverage. Arab citizens, whose eligible-voter share has grown alongside Israel's overall population, turned out in numbers that election broadcasters said could leave Arab parties holding the balance of power in a deadlocked parliament.

A Knife-Edge Vote

Broadcaster exit polls released shortly after polls closed put Likud at 27 seats, with Netanyahu's four-party religious and nationalist bloc (Likud, Shas, Otzma Yehudit, United Torah Judaism and Religious Zionism-Zehut) at roughly 51 to 55 seats. Eisenkot's Yashar party, running against Likud for the first time, was projected at 20 to 22 seats, with the broader bloc of parties opposed to Netanyahu — Yashar, the Bennett-Lapid alliance Together, the Democrats and Yisrael Beiteinu — clustering at roughly 49 to 51 seats, according to exit-poll figures carried by the Jerusalem Post's live election coverage. The exit polls are preliminary and have varied somewhat from broadcaster to broadcaster, as is typical on Israeli election nights, though all point to the same basic deadlock.

That left the Arab-majority parties Ra'am and the Joint List, projected at a combined 18 to 19 seats — up from five each in the outgoing Knesset — as the only bloc with room to swing a governing majority either way, though neither has historically joined an Israeli governing coalition. The 120-seat Knesset is elected under closed-list proportional representation in a single nationwide constituency, with a 3.25% threshold for entry, a system described in civics material published by Israel's Ministry of Education, which also confirms the vote was held on October 27 for the 26th Knesset.

The Numbers Behind the Deadlock

The election drew on an electorate drawn from Israel's population of just over 10.2 million people, of whom roughly 21% are Arab citizens, according to the most recent demographic release from Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics. An estimated 53,000 Israelis living abroad had registered to travel home specifically to vote, since Israeli law generally bars voting from outside the country except for diplomats and sailors.

Official, certified results are not expected for days; Israel's Central Elections Committee, an independent statutory body, must process the full count, including military and absentee ballots, before the final composition of the Knesset is confirmed.

A Campaign Shaped by War and the Draft

The vote was called after the governing coalition collapsed over a dispute that has dogged Israeli politics for two years: whether ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students must be conscripted into the military like other Israelis. Israel's High Court ruled in June 2024 that there was no legal basis for the longstanding blanket exemption, ordering the state to begin drafting eligible men and to halt funding to yeshivas whose students ignored draft notices. Haredi parties in Netanyahu's coalition refused to accept a replacement exemption law they considered too strict, and Shas and United Torah Judaism ultimately forced the government toward early elections rather than compromise.

That fight, layered on top of the aftermath of the Gaza war and last year's conflict with Iran, dominated a campaign fought under the shadow of national trauma. Eisenkot, the IDF's 21st chief of staff from 2015 to 2019, entered politics in 2022 as part of Benny Gantz's National Unity alliance before breaking away in September 2025 to found Yashar — Hebrew for "upright" or "straight" — as a security-focused, explicitly Zionist alternative to both Likud and the secular centrist parties. His son Gal, a 25-year-old reservist and combat medic, was killed by an explosive device in northern Gaza in December 2023, a loss that became a central part of his political biography and, his supporters say, lent weight to his campaign's argument that Netanyahu had mismanaged the war's aftermath and the burden-sharing dispute over military service.

Likud's campaign, by contrast, leaned heavily on warnings about Iran and the party's record during the war, while haredi parties campaigned explicitly against any further concessions on the draft law. Analysts have described the election as, in effect, a referendum on Netanyahu's decade-plus tenure and on the social contract between secular and religious Israelis exposed by two years of wartime mobilization.

What Comes Next

With both Zionist blocs short of a majority, attention turns to the Arab parties and to whichever side can assemble 61 votes through some combination of defections, mergers or informal arrangements that stop short of formal coalition membership — an outcome without recent precedent in Israeli politics given decades of Arab parties being excluded from, or declining to join, governing coalitions.

Speaking to supporters at Likud headquarters as the first exit polls were broadcast, Netanyahu claimed his bloc had won "a decisive majority" among what he called the "Zionist public," while cautioning that the night's figures were preliminary.

"We are still waiting for the true results," Netanyahu told the crowd, according to the Times of Israel's live coverage of the Likud event.

Eisenkot, addressing his own supporters, said Israelis had "voted for change and against" the prime minister, according to video of his remarks carried by the same outlet. Likud officials, meanwhile, have signaled they may contest the legitimacy of a narrow loss if the final count does not match the party's internal projections, according to Israeli media reporting cited by the Times of Israel, a dynamic that could complicate an already fragile transition regardless of which bloc ultimately prevails.

The closeness of the result all but guarantees a protracted coalition negotiation, with the ultra-Orthodox parties' demand for a new draft-exemption law, the Arab parties' unprecedented leverage, and the unresolved question of who commands a working majority in the 120-seat chamber all left for the weeks ahead.