Israeli Prime Minister and Likud party leader Benjamin Netanyahu gives a statement following exit polls for Israel’s national election, at Likud’s election headquarters in Jerusalem, Oct. 28, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad

Israel’s Central Elections Committee finished the double envelopes on Thursday afternoon and the last regular ballots that evening, and by midnight Israel time its page showed 5,716,665 votes counted. The blocs didn’t move. The final count the committee put out overnight gives 53 seats to Netanyahu’s side, 48 to Gadi Eisenkot’s, and 19 to the Arab lists. The envelopes came to 451,981 votes.

Likud took a seat from Shas, which leaves Likud on 27 and Shas on six, which Channel 12’s Amit Segal says is its lowest since 1992. A second seat crossed between the Arab lists. The Joint List dropped to 11 and Ra’am went up to eight.

Wednesday’s count left each side one short of a parliamentary majority even with an Arab list added, 60 apiece. Now it’s 61 and 59, with the parties’ surplus agreements or without them. Keep the two camps as they ran, add one Arab list, and only Netanyahu’s gets there.

On Thursday morning Justice Noam Sohlberg, the High Court’s deputy president who chairs the elections committee, asked Shin Bet chief David Zini to look into “serious suspicions” that the vote was swayed by “funds from foreign entities acting against the Israeli interest,” and to report back within a week. His letter didn’t name a country. Hebrew media say it’s Qatar, and Doha denies it. Sohlberg also wrote that he couldn’t vouch for the suspicions himself. By evening the Shin Bet was calling its probe “focused and limited in scope,” and Eisenkot, briefed by Zini and Sohlberg, came out saying it was “too early to understand what happened and if it happened at all.” Overnight, with Sohlberg’s approval, Dean Livne, the committee’s acting director general, said the probe “will not affect the final results submitted to the president.”

Separately, police have now detained seven people in a Negev vote-buying case tied to support for Ra’am, three of them school principals. Ynet reports that nobody has established a link between that case and the Shin Bet’s.

Likud’s statement on Thursday morning called it “Ra’amgate” and said, “They stole the elections in Israel!” It also said that no Zionist party may cooperate with Ra’am or the Joint List.

Take the statement at its word and Likud has ruled out the only 61 its camp could build without somebody who ran against Netanyahu. That’s a bigger shift than it sounds. On election night, Ra’am’s Mansour Abbas told Channel 12 that a senior figure in the right-wing bloc had come to him a few days earlier about working together. On Thursday Likud shut that door, and Yair Golan, on Eisenkot’s side, went and met Abbas.

Abbas doesn’t think it goes anywhere. He told Ra’am’s leadership on Thursday that the chance of a minority government resting on Ra’am’s support is “slim to nonexistent.” Eisenkot’s camp is working on one anyway. Maariv reported on Thursday evening that the plan is a government of three lists, Eisenkot’s, Bennett’s, and Golan’s, which come to 41 seats, with everything else coming from outside. A source in the camp pointed the paper to 2021, when everyone was sure Ra’am was an impossible partner, right up until Abbas went to Lod, condemned the riots, and joined the government.

It’s 41 seats and not 48 because of Avigdor Liberman. He said on Thursday that he won’t sit “with Bibi or with Tibi,” meaning Netanyahu or the Joint List’s Ahmad Tibi, and told his own people he still won’t sit with the haredi parties or lean on the Arab ones. Bennett, for his part, hosted Eisenkot at his home in Ra’anana on Thursday evening, and the two said they’d talked about “ways to form a good government in Israel as quickly as possible.”

“We must do everything, certainly after yesterday, to avoid another round of elections,” President Isaac Herzog said on Wednesday. Yoav Gallant called for a unity government on Thursday. Likud, Yashar, and Bennett’s list come to 60 between them, so it wouldn’t take much. But Netanyahu’s election-night offer to partners came without rotation, and Eisenkot has ruled out serving under him, rotation or not. Each man’s opening condition is the one the other has already turned down.

United Torah Judaism looked the other way on Thursday. A senior party official said UTJ would offer to back an Eisenkot government in return for an exemption law, and Channel 12 reported it might let him govern by abstaining. People in the party told Maariv that “Netanyahu has already proved he can’t give us what we demand,” and that the draft law is their threshold for any talks. By Friday morning Yaakov Asher’s office was saying no instruction had been given and the party hadn’t been to its rabbis since the election.

The Knesset, meanwhile, may matter more than the government for a while. Eisenkot said on Thursday that his staff are already drafting a military and national service law for everyone, and a state commission of inquiry into Oct. 7, to put to a vote once the Knesset opens. The parties against Netanyahu hold 67 seats, which on paper is enough to pass a law before anyone has formed a government. According to Maariv, the first fight is over the Knesset’s arranging committee, which sets up the other committees until a coalition exists and is chaired from the faction of whoever Herzog gives the first try. Replacing the Knesset speaker is on the table too, and Netanyahu’s people are split on whether he’s better off going first or letting Eisenkot try and fail.

The last seat is thin enough to matter, a few thousand votes between Shas, Ra’am, and Yisrael Beytenu, and the committee says the numbers can change until official results on Nov. 4. Sohlberg’s week runs out around then too. Likud says it will take polling stations to court, and it has 14 days after the official results to do it, but a petition doesn’t hold up the Knesset. Herzog is expected to start seeing the factions on the 4th, and he has seven days from the official results to hand someone the first try. The 26th Knesset is due to be sworn in on Nov. 10 either way.

Likud has said no to Ra’am, Ra’am’s name is on a Negev bribery case nobody has tied to the Shin Bet’s probe, and the Shin Bet has a week.

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.