Netanyahu Bloc Falls Short of Majority as Arab Parties Emerge as Israel's Kingmakers

When the count ended, no one in Israel's Knesset had a majority. The 2026 election produced a hung parliament: the bloc around Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu finished with 53 seats, short of the 61 needed in the 120-seat chamber, and neither of the other two groupings came close to making up the difference alone.

The Netanyahu bloc is built from five parties. Likud took 27 seats. United Torah Judaism and Otzma Yehudit each won 7, Shas won 6, and Religious Zionism won 6. Together that comes to 53.

The Jewish opposition bloc led by Gadi Eisenkot won 48. His own party, Yashar, was the strongest of its members with 21 seats. B'Yachad took 12, The Democrats 8, and Yisrael Beytenu 7. Yashar's 21 also made it the second-largest single party in the count, behind Likud's 27.

The Arab-led parties won 19 seats between them: the Joint List with 11 and Ra'am with 8. With neither of the larger blocs able to reach 61, that block of votes has put those parties in the position of potential kingmakers. Some parties will have to realign or join other blocs if a government is to be formed at all. The reporting does not say which realignments are likely.

The calendar now takes over. The result must be officially certified and presented to President Isaac Herzog by November 4. The new Knesset is scheduled to be sworn in on November 10, according to Al Jazeera. By November 11, Herzog is to give a member of the Knesset the task of forming a government. He is reported to be making that choice after hearing from party leaders, and to be looking for the candidate best placed to assemble a majority coalition.

That person will then have 28 days to put a government together, with the possibility of a 14-day extension.

Eisenkot has already framed the numbers. He said that however they are counted, a majority of Israeli citizens, by a margin of more than half a million votes, voted against what he called the government of October 7 and draft evasion, and in favour of change. He added a warning aimed at the coming negotiations: do not let anyone mislead you, because in Israel it is the Knesset that gives its confidence to the government, not the other way around. The Times of Israel carried the remarks.

The arithmetic is the whole story at this point. Netanyahu is eight seats short of 61, Eisenkot's bloc is thirteen short, and the 19 Arab-party seats sit outside both. What to watch is whom Herzog names around November 11, and whether any party moves across the lines drawn on election night during the weeks that follow.