With 85% of votes counted, Netanyahu bloc has 53 seats, Eisenkot’s 48; Arab parties surge to 19

The Central Election Committee (CEC) said Wednesday afternoon that with 85.6 percent of ballots counted, the bloc led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was poised to win 53 seats in the 120-member Knesset, and the bloc led by Yashar party chair Gadi Eisenkot would win 48 seats, leaving both blocs far from a 61-seat majority.

The two predominantly Arab parties were poised to win a historic 19 seats between them, putting them in a potential kingmaker position, after Arab voters turned out in record numbers to vote in Tuesday’s election, hoping to oust Netanyahu and his far-right allies from the seat of power. Their previous high had been 15 seats.

The picture that was emerging by Wednesday evening was different from the one that had been painted in most mainstream polls in the weeks and months leading up to the election, which had almost all shown Eisenkot’s bloc taking the lead over Netanyahu’s with varying margins, though similarly without anyone having a clear path to a coalition.

It was also a reversal from Tuesday night’s exit polls published by major broadcasters the moment voting ended at 10 p.m., which showed Eisenkot’s bloc ahead of Netanyahu’s by two or three seats.

But as the count progressed overnight and into Wednesday afternoon, it appeared that the exit polls had missed the mark, as both Netanyahu’s party and bloc pulled ahead of Eisenkot’s.

In its update just after 2:30 p.m. on Wednesday, the CEC said 85.6% of total votes had been counted, representing the results from 92.9% of ballot boxes.

While the results were not final, they weren’t expected to change dramatically, and it was expected that the figures, which had been updated regularly since early Wednesday morning, would not be updated again until Thursday.

In a statement, the CEC said the remaining ordinary ballots would require additional oversight, accounting for the expected delay. Additionally, the CEC said around 430,000 and 480,000 so-called double envelope votes had yet to be counted.

It noted that the estimated number of double envelopes was preliminary, as officials were still receiving and processing the ballots.

The ballots, cast primarily by soldiers, prisoners, diplomats stationed abroad and others unable to vote at their designated polling stations, are counted separately and had yet to be tallied as of Wednesday evening, as officials are required to verify that each voter has not already voted elsewhere.

The full vote count was therefore due to be released on Thursday afternoon. The final, official election results are expected to be published on November 4.

With each Knesset seat thought to be worth around 40,000 votes, these absentee ballots could have an impact on the final political landscape, and the results from them were expected to be added to the overall tally in the next couple of days.

In the meantime, however, a picture was emerging of a divided country, with no clear victory for either Netanyahu’s bloc or Eisenkot’s bloc, unless they are willing to work with each other or with the Arab-led Ra’am and Joint List parties.

As of the 2:32 p.m. update, Netanyahu’s Likud was the largest party with 26 seats out of a possible 120, followed by Eisenkot’s Yashar with 21.

Naftali Bennett’s B’Yachad party and Yousef Jabareen’s Joint List were both at 12 seats each, and the left-wing Democrats held eight seats.

The far-right Otzma Yehudit and ultra-Orthodox Shas and United Torah Judaism parties each held seven seats, as did Mansour Abbas’s Ra’am and Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu.

Rounding out the 120-seat Knesset was Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism with six seats.

This left Yoaz Hendel’s Reservists-Economic party below the 3.25% electoral threshold with 2.63% of the vote, along with Ofer Winter’s People of Israel, which had collected just 1.61% of the vote.

The Charedi Public, a longshot party that had offered an alternative vision to Israel’s ultra-Orthodox communities, was far below the threshold, with just 0.19% of the vote.

In practice, the division of seats between parties left the Netanyahu-led bloc, comprised of Likud, Shas, United Torah Judaism, Otzma Yehudit and Religious Zionism, with 53 seats — eight short of a 61-seat majority. The bloc has 68 seats in the current Knesset, marking a significant drop.

Eisenkot’s bloc, made up of Yashar, B’Yachad, The Democrats and Yisrael Beytenu, meanwhile, had a collective 48 seats — 13 short of a majority.

The Arab-led parties — the Joint List and Ra’am — held between them the remaining 19 seats, an all-time high and almost double their current 10 seats. This would be more than enough to tip the anti-Netanyahu bloc into a comfortable majority, if all Zionist bloc members except The Democrats hadn’t ruled out cooperating with Ra’am or the Joint List.