Israel’s Central Elections Committee has published the final results of the country’s 2026 general election, and they confirm what the exit polls first suggested: nobody won. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc finished first, but well short of a governing majority, leaving Israel facing weeks — possibly months — of coalition bargaining.
The final count, published in the early hours of Friday after the double-envelope ballots were tallied, gives the pro-Netanyahu bloc 53 of the Knesset’s 120 seats. The anti-Netanyahu opposition bloc has 48, and the Arab parties hold the remaining 19. A government needs 61.
Netanyahu is eight seats short. His main rival, Gadi Eisenkot, is thirteen short. That arithmetic is what makes the next stage so difficult: neither camp can govern alone, and neither can govern without winning over parties that have spent the campaign opposing it.
The full seat breakdown
Netanyahu’s Likud remains the largest single party, with 27 seats. Eisenkot’s Yashar follows with 21, and Naftali Bennett’s B’Yachad has 12. The Joint List won 11 seats, while The Democrats and Ra’am took eight each. Yisrael Beytenu, Otzma Yehudit and United Torah Judaism each won seven, and Shas and Religious Zionism six apiece.
Three parties fell below the 3.25 percent electoral threshold and will not enter the Knesset at all, including the Reservists list, which took about 2.7 percent of the vote.
Turnout was 77.9 percent of eligible voters — the highest figure in decades, and a measure of how seriously Israelis took an election held in the shadow of war. Voting in Arab communities was reported at around 80 percent, a surge that helps explain the Arab parties’ result.
A record result for the Arab parties
The 19 seats won by the Joint List and Ra’am combined are an all-time high, almost double the 10 the Arab parties held in the outgoing Knesset. It makes them, arithmetically, the kingmakers of this parliament: add their 19 to the opposition’s 48 and you get 67, a majority — on paper, at least.
Whether that paper majority can become a government is another question entirely. The opposition bloc spans the centre, the centre-left and the right-wing B’Yachad, and the Arab parties have never been part of a governing coalition in Israel’s history, with the exception of Ra’am’s brief role supporting the previous change government. No party leader has yet publicly proposed a coalition that includes them.
By contrast, Netanyahu’s own bloc has shrunk sharply: the parties that make up the current government held 68 seats in the outgoing Knesset. They have lost 15.
What happens next
The formal timetable is now fixed. The official results will be submitted to President Isaac Herzog on November 4, after the committee completes its checks for errors and complaints. The new, 26th Knesset will be sworn in on November 10, whether or not a government has been formed by then.
Herzog will then consult party representatives before nominating a candidate to try to form a government. That candidate will have weeks to build a coalition, and if the first attempt fails, the mandate can pass to another candidate. Analysts quoted in Israeli media expect the process to take more than two months.
Netanyahu has already begun. He met Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, leader of Religious Zionism, on Friday to coordinate efforts after the election, according to Hebrew media reports, and has told his partners that they are “together and staying together”. He has said he will form what he calls a strong right-wing government — a claim that, on these numbers, requires him to find eight seats from outside his bloc.
The fraud claims — and the committee’s answer
The final results landed in the middle of a dispute over the count itself. Likud claimed on Friday that Arab parties had “stolen” the election, alleging bribery, threats and forgery, and said it would hand police and the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security agency, what it called hundreds of testimonies.
The Central Elections Committee has pushed back firmly. Its acting director general, Dean Livne, said reports of widespread fraud were “entirely unfounded” and that the investigation ordered by the committee’s chairman, Supreme Court Justice Noam Sohlberg, into suspicions of foreign influence “will not affect the final results submitted to the president”. Police have likewise said there is no supporting evidence for the broader claim that the election was stolen.
That leaves the result standing — and the politics unresolved. Israel has voted, the count is complete, and the country that went to the polls in record numbers still does not know who will govern it. The bargaining, which will decide whether Netanyahu survives as prime minister or whether a rival can assemble 61 seats against him, starts now.
Related: our earlier coverage of the early count and of record turnout on election night.
