Israeli politicians react following a vote to dissolve the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, before the end of its term, at the Knesset, in Jerusalem, May 20, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun

At 10 pm on Tuesday night, Channel 12’s exit poll gave Gadi Eisenkot’s camp 52 seats and Benjamin Netanyahu’s 50. By half past two on Wednesday afternoon in Israel, with 85.6 percent of the vote counted, the Central Elections Committee’s numbers ran the other way. Netanyahu’s five parties are on 53 seats, the four around Eisenkot on 48, and the two Arab lists on 19. That’s how Amit Segal, Channel 12’s chief political analyst, works out the seats from the committee’s count, surplus agreements and all.

Nobody has 61. And, of course, none of this is final yet. More than half a million double-envelope ballots — cast by soldiers, evacuees, diplomats, and hospital patients voting away from home — get counted from midnight on Wednesday through Thursday evening, according to the head of the committee’s control center. Official results aren’t due until Nov. 4, so the figures can fluctuate until then.

Three weeks ago, I told readers here to count to 61, and gave them the polls to count with. Nineteen seat polls in September and early October had Likud at a median of 21. The count has it at 26. On Wednesday morning Segal wrote that there’s “no statistical way” to explain a six-seat opposition lead turning over in four days. He credits two of them, the pollsters at Channel 14 and Channel 15, with reading Likud’s strength all along.

The exit polls missed too, though, and they don’t have four days to blame. Channel 12’s 10 o’clock poll asked people on their way out of the polling station and still had Netanyahu’s side three seats below where the count has it now. Some of that is probably turnout. Every pollster missed how many Arab citizens would vote, Segal says, and overall turnout came in at 77.7 percent, the highest since 1999.

So, what did the count actually move? In 2022, Netanyahu’s coalition won 64 seats on 48.4 percent of the vote. On Wednesday’s count, Netanyahu’s five lists have 53 seats and 42.1 percent. Eisenkot’s four lists have 37.7 percent, a little under what Yesh Atid, National Unity, Yisrael Beytenu, Labor, and Meretz took between them last time. The Arab lists went from 10.7 percent and 10 seats to 15 percent and 19. Another 4.2 percent is stranded on two lists under the threshold: the Reservists, Yoaz Hendel and Yaron Zelekha’s party, and Ofer Winter’s Amcha Yisrael, which ran backing Netanyahu for prime minister.

Segal’s summary on Wednesday morning was that Netanyahu “hasn’t won yet, but the change bloc was defeated.” Against the polls, he’s right. Eisenkot’s camp went into Tuesday ahead in nearly every poll but Channel 14’s, ran what Segal calls the best-organized campaign he’s seen since he started covering politics, flew voters home from abroad, and finished with about the seats it had. But an hour and a half earlier Segal had written that four years of polls turned out not to describe reality at all. Against the last real result, the outgoing coalition lost 11 seats and its majority. He’s measuring the change bloc’s defeat against numbers he’d just told us not to trust.

Netanyahu’s 53 and Mansour Abbas’s seven Ra’am seats make 60. Eisenkot’s 48 and the Joint List’s 12 make 60 too. Eisenkot would need both Arab lists to get past it, and by his own criteria, Segal says, a government that rests on the Joint List is one he can’t legitimately form. Yair Golan, who leads the Democrats inside Eisenkot’s camp, wants to try anyway. “I know how to count to 120. Sixty-five is more than 55,” he posted at an earlier stage of the count.

That leaves Naftali Bennett, Avigdor Liberman, and Eisenkot with what Segal calls “a dilemma from hell”: another election, joining Netanyahu “on hard terms and against their election commitments,” or begging Ra’am and the Joint List.

Fly&Vote, which campaigns to get Israelis abroad home to vote, expected about 67,000 of them on Tuesday, a seat and a half by its count. Perhaps the numbers will reflect that — and what might be a record — but it isn’t likely that the same number comes back if a second round of voting is called for.

Not everyone flew home over seat math. A costume designer who’s lived abroad for three decades told Ynet that when he says he’s Israeli now, “there’s a certain defensiveness to it,” and he puts that down to Israel’s policies. It’s an argument I’ve heard a lot from Jews abroad this year, that Netanyahu is why they’re treated the way they are.

Mark Freedman, who chairs the board of Amiti, told The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday that what’s changed is “an old form of antisemitism that has renewed itself, the one that deems Jews in North America to somehow have collective responsibility for the actions of the Israeli government.” Deborah Apeloig, who runs Tikkun Talks in Latin America, told the Post: “Those politicians are responsible for their words; the people spreading antisemitism are responsible for theirs. But we in the Diaspora live with the consequences of both.” Nobody’s coalition talks will settle that part.

Segal closed on a line I can’t follow. After a whole campaign spent hunting for a third, unity bloc, he wrote, maybe it turned out to be the Arab parties, whose turnout wrecked both sides’ hopes of 61 and reminded Jews on both sides that they may have to learn to sit together. It’s a good line. The count has two Arab answers in it, though, and they don’t agree. In Rahat, with 31 polling stations in, Ra’am had 83.6 percent of the vote and the Joint List 14.7. Abbas sat in Bennett’s government in 2021, and told Channel 12 on Tuesday night that “with these numbers, there’s no government.” Yousef Jabareen, who chairs the Joint List, said on Wednesday that his party will use its strength to help send “the Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, and Smotrich government” home. Of the two, Ra’am is the only one either camp could even ask.

Leave the Arab parties out and every combination that reaches 61 has the draft in it. Netanyahu spoke at about three on Wednesday morning. He thanked his “loyal partners,” invited anyone who wants to join to come in “without rotation,” and said the bloc has “a clear majority among the Jewish public.”

Of the votes counted for lists other than the two Arab ones, his five parties have just under half. Add either Bennett or Liberman and it’s a clear majority of the vote. In seats it’s tighter. Bennett’s 12 would take Netanyahu to 65, and Liberman’s seven would leave him at 60. They’re the two men who spent the campaign going after the Haredi exemption.

On Tuesday night, before the count turned, Bennett said that “the alliance of those who serve beat the alliance of draft-dodgers.” Liberman told Likud’s members to rebel and get rid of Netanyahu. And Eisenkot promised in his own speech that night to form “a Zionist government that drafts everyone,” committed to “passing a law of service for all.”

So, a government without the Arab parties either puts Likud in a room with somebody who ran on ending the exemption, or puts Eisenkot’s camp in a room with Shas and United Torah Judaism.

The haredi parties come out of the count with 14 seats, down from 18. In June of last year Degel HaTorah’s rabbis told their MKs to move to dissolve the Knesset because the coalition hadn’t passed an exemption law. On Monday I wrote here that whoever gets to 61 takes over 110,330 men the state has declared draft evaders or placed under an Order 12. Tuesday didn’t move that number. It’s on the table in every one of those rooms.

The envelopes get opened from midnight, and a seat can still move. The Reservists are about 30,000 votes short of the threshold on the count so far. In 2022 they moved one, and it moved between the blocs. With the regular ballots counted, Netanyahu’s bloc had 65. The envelopes took a seat from United Torah Judaism and gave it to Yisrael Beytenu, and he governed with 64. Then come official results, Herzog’s consultations, and 28 days for whoever gets the first try.

I said count to 61. Nobody can yet, and whoever gets there will have to answer for the draft before anything else. We’ll see who goes first.

Uriel Zehavi is Managing Director of the Mitzpe Institute (mitzpe.org) and writes the Israel Brief (israelbrief.com), Sunday to Friday. He is the author of four books, most recently Rooted in Judea: Lives and Law in the Heart of Israel.