Exit polls from Israel's three main broadcasters, Kan 11, Channel 12 and Channel 13, put Likud first with 24 to 25 seats and Gadi Eisenkot's Yashar second with 21 to 23, a gap of roughly two to four seats that is well within each survey's margin of error. Turnout reached 74.3 percent by 8pm, more than 5.4 million voters, among the highest in Israel's recent history.
Neither bloc is close to the 61 seats needed to govern. Netanyahu's bloc, Likud with Shas, United Torah Judaism, Otzma Yehudit and Religious Zionism, lands at 50 seats in both the Channel 12 and Channel 13 surveys. The Jewish parties opposed to Netanyahu, Yashar, B'Yachad, the Democrats and Yisrael Beytenu, reach only 52 to 53, eight or nine seats short on their own.
That leaves the Joint List and Ra'am, polling a combined 17 to 18 seats, a record high for Arab-led parties and enough on paper to put Eisenkot's bloc over 61 if they joined or even just backed it from outside. Arab-led parties have historically stayed out of formal coalitions, which is exactly the scenario Netanyahu's campaign spent the final weeks warning about: his billboards that read right or Palestine, and his campaign manager's response to Eisenkot's debate challenge naming Ra'am's Mansour Abbas and Hadash's Ahmad Tibi by name, both assumed this arithmetic before the exit polls confirmed it.
Both Netanyahu and Eisenkot are expected to claim victory tonight and both will appeal to President Herzog for the first chance at forming a government, the same mandate process Herzog spent the campaign promising to use carefully so Israel would not repeat the four elections it held between 2019 and 2021. Tonight's numbers are the first test of that promise: a Knesset this evenly split, with its decisive bloc being the one neither side has built its platform around courting, is exactly the kind of result that produced a repeat election the last time Israel saw it.
