"Israel Election 2026: Exit Polls Said Deadlock, the Count Is Telling a Different Story"

On Tuesday night, within a minute of the polls closing at 10 p.m., Israel appeared to have its answer. Three television exit polls — Kan 11, Channel 12 and Channel 13 — landed with unusual precision on the same story: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's bloc on 50 seats, the opposition bloc led by former military chief Gadi Eisenkot on 52 to 53, and the Arab parties on a striking 17 to 18. Sixty-one seats are needed to govern the 120-seat Knesset, and on the first hard evidence of the night, nobody had them.

The details filled in the picture. Netanyahu's Likud remained the largest single party, projected at 24 to 25 seats, ahead of Eisenkot's Yashar at 21 to 23. But the bloc behind Likud had fallen from the 64 seats it won in 2022 to 50, a loss the Israel Democracy Institute's president called a significant defeat for the governing coalition. Turnout reached 77.7 percent by 10 p.m., the highest at that hour since 1999, in the country's first national election since the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks and the wars that followed in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran. Both men claimed a mandate that night; neither declared victory. Eisenkot said he would immediately act to implement the people's decision, while Netanyahu urged the formation of a right-wing government.

Then the count began, and the story started to move. By Wednesday morning, with roughly 42 percent of votes counted, the Netanyahu bloc was reported ahead at 57 seats to the opposition's 47, with Likud itself at around 28. The pro-Netanyahu Channel 14, dismissed on Tuesday night as an outlier for projecting 60 seats for his bloc against 43 for Eisenkot's, suddenly looked less outlandish. The deadlock that three exit polls had agreed on was already stale by breakfast. This is the part of election night that deserves more attention than it usually gets: exit polls are a sample, not a result. Small parties hovering near the 3.25 percent electoral threshold can redraw the map as real ballots are counted, and up to 650,000 double-envelope ballots — worth roughly 15 seats — were still to be tallied.

What has not changed, even in the friendlier count, is the arithmetic problem. Fifty-seven is still four seats short of a government, and the parties holding the balance are the Arab parties, projected at 16 to 19 seats, whose participation in a governing coalition both camps have largely ruled out, with the exception of the Democrats' Yair Golan. Netanyahu stays on as caretaker prime minister while coalition talks drag on, which is a familiar place for Israeli politics: the country went to the polls five times between 2019 and 2022 before the current government formed. The official results are due from the Central Elections Committee by November 4, and until then every projection, including this article's, is provisional.

My own read is that the night's real story is not the deadlock but its fragility. A parliament that three polls measured one way and a partial count measured another is a parliament nobody can claim with confidence yet, and that uncertainty is itself the verdict so far: a country that turned out in record numbers has produced a legislature no single camp can govern alone. I predict that when the final official results are published, neither bloc will have reached 61 seats, and the hard bargaining — over partners, promises, or another election — will begin in earnest. If the count proves me wrong, the verdict will say so, and that is the point of keeping score in public.