Israelis voted Tuesday in a national election widely seen as a referendum on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership after the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack and the wars that followed. [E1]
More than 7.3 million Israelis were eligible to vote, according to Israel’s Central Election Committee. [E2]
Most of Israel’s roughly 12,000 polling stations were due to close at 10 p.m., after which ballots would be counted manually at each station. [E3]
Channel 13’s final poll put Gadi Eisenkot’s change bloc on 54 seats, Netanyahu’s parties on 50 and Arab parties on 16. [E4]
The same projection left both main blocs short of a Knesset majority. [E5]
Within seven days of the official announcement of election results, the president consults elected blocs and assigns the government-formation task to a party leader with enough support for a viable coalition, Israel Policy Forum said. [E6]
The desk's reading. The desk assigns a 75% probability that post-vote coalition bargaining follows the official result. It starts from a neutral 50% prior. The final poll moves the estimate because neither main bloc reaches the majority threshold in the projection and the 16 projected Arab-party seats create a negotiating pivot. The strongest competing reading is that late vote movement gives one bloc an outright majority, ending that bargaining before it starts.
The next test. The call settles YES if the official result leaves both main blocs below 61 seats and, within seven days of the official announcement, the president assigns the government-formation task to a leader with enough support for a viable coalition. It settles NO if either bloc reaches that threshold or no such designation is made in that period.