Partial results from Israel’s national election show the political bloc aligned with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu holding roughly 56 of the Knesset’s 120 seats, with close to 60 percent of polling stations reported, according to tallies circulated by Israeli broadcasters and wire services on Thursday. That figure leaves the bloc five seats short of the 61 required to form a government — a gap small enough that the outcome remains genuinely unsettled.
Voting closed Wednesday evening across Israel, and the count has continued through the night and into Thursday at regional collection centers overseen by the Central Elections Committee. Early exit projections published by Israel’s main television channels when polls closed differed from one another and from the running count, a pattern familiar from previous Israeli elections, where late-counted ballots have repeatedly reshuffled the final seat map.
What the partial count actually shows
The 56-seat number is a bloc total, not a single party result. It aggregates Netanyahu’s Likud with the religious and nationalist parties that have campaigned on bringing him back as prime minister or keeping him there. Party-level breakdowns were still moving as additional stations reported, and several smaller lists were hovering near the 3.25 percent electoral threshold — the cutoff that, under Israeli law, determines whether a party enters the Knesset at all or sees its votes discarded entirely.
That threshold is the single most consequential variable in the hours ahead. A list that finishes just above it typically takes four seats; a list that finishes just below takes none, and its votes are effectively removed from the pool. One party crossing or failing to cross can move a bloc from stalemate to majority, or the reverse. In the 2021 election, surplus-vote agreements and threshold outcomes shaped the arithmetic that eventually produced a government without Netanyahu — only for that coalition to collapse within 18 months.
The ballots counted last
Several categories of votes are not tallied at local stations at all. Israel’s so-called “double envelope” ballots — cast by soldiers on active duty, prison inmates, hospital patients and staff, people with disabilities voting outside their registered precinct, and diplomats and other Israelis stationed abroad — are collected, verified against voter rolls to prevent duplication, and counted separately at a central facility in Jerusalem.
Those ballots have historically amounted to a few percent of the national total, and they do not break evenly. Military votes have tended to favor nationalist and religious parties; other categories have skewed differently. In past cycles, the double-envelope count has shifted between one and three seats, which is precisely the margin now in question.
Under Israeli law, the Central Elections Committee — chaired by a Supreme Court justice — must deliver certified results to the president within eight days of election day. Until that certification, every published figure, including the 56-seat total, is provisional. The committee publishes running and final tallies through its official portal at bechirot.gov.il.
Why 61 is the only number that counts
Israel’s electoral system is nationwide proportional representation with a single district, which means no party has ever won an outright majority of the 120-seat Knesset. Governments are built by coalition, and 61 is the floor.
Once results are certified, the president consults representatives of every elected party and then tasks the member of Knesset judged most likely to succeed with forming a government. That candidate gets 28 days, extendable by 14. If the attempt fails, the president may assign the task to another member for 28 days. If that also fails, a majority of 61 members can nominate a candidate directly within 21 days; absent that, the Knesset dissolves and Israel heads to another election.
The practical implication of a 56-seat bloc is that Netanyahu would need to recruit from outside his campaign alliance — or persuade individual members to defect — while rival parties would need to assemble a majority from a coalition spanning centrists, the left, and potentially Arab parties whose participation has been a persistent sticking point. Neither route is straightforward, and both have failed before.
The backdrop
The election arrives after a stretch in which Netanyahu has faced simultaneous legal and diplomatic pressure. His corruption trial, opened in 2020, has continued through his time in office. The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for him in November 2024 over the conduct of the Gaza war, a decision Israel has rejected as illegitimate. Separately, Turkey issued its own arrest warrant for the prime minister, a largely symbolic step that nonetheless underscored his narrowed diplomatic room.
Domestic policy fights also shaped the campaign. Netanyahu’s decision to order the removal of unauthorized West Bank outposts under American pressure angered parts of his nationalist base while doing little to satisfy his critics on the center and left — a bind that helps explain why his bloc appears to have stalled near, but not at, a majority.
What to watch next
- Threshold cases. Which small lists finish above 3.25 percent, and whether any surplus-vote agreements redistribute a final seat.
- Double envelopes. The central count in Jerusalem, which can move the bloc totals by one to three seats.
- Turnout geography. Whether late-reporting areas — including Arab-majority localities and ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods, which report at different speeds — pull the numbers in a consistent direction.
- Certification. The Central Elections Committee’s official submission to the president, which starts the coalition clock.
Until those steps are complete, the honest description of the result is that Netanyahu’s bloc is close to a majority and not yet in possession of one. Israeli election nights have a long record of producing headlines that the final count later contradicts, and the margin here is well inside that historical range of error. NarwhalTV will update this story as the Central Elections Committee releases further tallies.
