Less than six hours after Gadi Eisenkot declared victory on the strength of the exit polls, Israel’s first official results told a different story. With about a quarter of ballot boxes counted early on Wednesday, Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc was not trailing. It was leading — by a wide margin.
Partial results published by the Central Elections Committee, and reported by The Times of Israel, put the pro-Netanyahu bloc at 63 seats against 49 for the anti-Netanyahu bloc, with just over a quarter of ballot boxes counted as of 4:05 a.m. local time. The eight remaining seats in the 120-seat Knesset, Israel’s parliament, were held by the nonaligned Joint List of predominantly Arab factions.
Those numbers directly contradict the story of election night. The exit polls broadcast when voting closed at 10 p.m. on Tuesday had Eisenkot’s opposition bloc ahead, 52 or 53 seats to about 50 for Netanyahu’s camp, and Eisenkot took the stage in Tel Aviv to claim the voters had delivered their verdict. Revised exit polls later in the night narrowed the gap — two channels called it a 51-51 tie, a third gave Netanyahu’s bloc a 52-49 edge — but none of them predicted the lead the early count is now showing.
None of this is final, and the early count comes with large warnings attached. The first ballots counted are not a representative sample: votes cast in double envelopes — including those of soldiers, hospital patients and diplomats — are tallied later and have shifted Israeli results before. Parties hovering near the 3.25 percent electoral threshold can still change the arithmetic; in the early count, the Arab party Ra’am sat just below it at 3.2 percent, and if it crosses the line, seats will move. A separate tally, with about 28 percent of votes counted, gave Likud 29 seats to Yashar’s 20 — narrower than the 63-49 bloc split. The honest reading at this hour is that the exit polls were wrong about who was ahead, and the final margin is still unknown.
The two rivals spent the night claiming the future anyway. Addressing Likud supporters at party headquarters in Jerusalem after 3 a.m., Netanyahu called for the formation of “a strong, right-wing national government” and urged Jewish parties to line up behind him. He described a coalition that relied on Arab parties as a disgrace and a shame, and raised the prospect of renewed joint action with US President Donald Trump against Iran. Eisenkot said the public had voted against Netanyahu remaining prime minister and called on him to retire from politics. Neither man claimed outright victory.
Two facts from election night are not in doubt. Turnout reached 77.7 percent, the highest in more than two decades, in Israel’s first general election since the October 7, 2023 attacks. And the Arab parties, outside both main blocs, are on course for a record 18 or 19 seats combined, which could make them kingmakers — even though Eisenkot has largely ruled out governing with them, and Netanyahu has now ruled it out in the harshest terms. The far-right religious parties of Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, inside Netanyahu’s bloc, were projected at a combined 13 seats, with no major gains. Likud, meanwhile, looks set to remain the largest single party, a prize that matters when the president weighs whom to ask to form a government.
What happens next is a slow process, not a single moment. Counting continues through the week, with final results to be certified by November 4. President Isaac Herzog will then consult the elected factions and hand the mandate to the member of parliament he judges most likely to build a coalition. Netanyahu stays on as caretaker prime minister throughout, which means the deadlock, paradoxically, works in his favour: the longer the negotiations drag on, the longer he remains in office, and if no one can assemble 61 seats, Israel could face yet another election.
That is why the early count matters far beyond who misread the polls. This election was, at its core, a referendum on whether Israel keeps the leader who has defined it for most of the past two decades or turns to the former military chief promising change — and on what course the country takes on Iran, on Gaza and on the war that has shaped it since October 2023. A right-wing government led by Netanyahu would pursue one answer; a change government led by Eisenkot, if he could ever assemble one, would pursue another. On Wednesday morning, the count said the first answer was back in front. By the time every ballot is counted, it may say something else — which is precisely why everyone should wait for the count rather than the polls.
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