Israeli Exit Polls Point to Deadlock as Eisenkot's Bloc Edges Netanyahu's in Record-Turnout Vote

Long lines formed outside polling stations across Israel on Tuesday, and by the time voting closed the Central Elections Committee put turnout at 77.7 percent. That is the highest in more than two decades and about 7 percentage points above the previous election in 2022. It was the first national vote since the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023, and the wars in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran that followed.

The exit polls pointed to a deadlock. Israel's three major networks updated their projections to give Gadi Eisenkot's bloc 52 seats and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud-led camp 50, a two-seat edge in the 120-seat Knesset. The remaining 18 seats went to unaligned Arab parties. Eisenkot, who leads the Yashar party, has all but ruled out governing with them, which complicates his route to a majority even with the lead.

Not every outlet saw it that way. Some Israeli media, including the pro-Netanyahu Channel 14, projected a much stronger result for Netanyahu and his allies, saying they would collectively win 60 seats. Final results could take days. No single party has ever won 61 seats outright, so coalitions are the norm, and smaller parties can end up as kingmakers.

Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute, called the exit polls a major defeat for Netanyahu's coalition, which they showed falling from 68 seats in the outgoing Knesset to about 50. But he said Eisenkot was not a clear winner and cautioned that much could change as ballots were counted. If the final tally mirrored the polls, he said, Eisenkot could try to form a minority government that would remove Netanyahu, even if it lasted only until another election. The stalemate could also help Netanyahu, who could remain in power in a caretaker capacity while parties try to build a coalition.

Opposition leader Yair Lapid said the Netanyahu bloc had suffered a crushing defeat and that the public had told it to go home. Yair Golan, leader of the Democrats party, told a rally after polls closed that the nation had given his party a sacred duty to fortify democracy. Eisenkot, 66, is a hawkish former military chief who lost a son and two nephews in the Gaza war. He entered politics only four years ago, joined Netanyahu's war cabinet after the 2023 attack, and quit eight months later, criticising the prime minister's leadership. He presents himself as a centrist at home, but he offers no break on security: he opposes Palestinian statehood and says Hamas's military wing must be destroyed or dismantled. He calls the war, which Gaza health authorities say has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians, a failure because Hamas remains in charge.

At the Joint List's headquarters in Nazareth, supporters burst into whistles and applause when the exit polls came out, on a night of historic turnout among Palestinian citizens of Israel. Candidate Faten Gattas told the crowd they refuse occupation and racism and will remain. Candidates hoped high Arab participation would help keep Netanyahu's coalition, the most far-right in Israel's history, from returning.

Netanyahu, 77, has been prime minister for nearly 19 of the past 30 years and has survived repeated crises. Opponents have removed him only once since 2009, after four inconclusive elections in two years, and he was back 18 months later. He entered this race facing corruption charges, which he denies, and criticism over the intelligence failures that let Hamas-led militants carry out their attack, in which 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage. He argues he made Israel and the world safer by assassinating top leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran, and he campaigned on an endorsement from US President Donald Trump, his ally in the war against Iran.

What to watch now is the official count over the coming days, and whether the gap between the network polls and Channel 14's 60-seat projection closes.