Netanyahu bloc leads as Israeli votes counted, but no majority

The camp of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was ahead of his rival’s opposition bloc but still short of a majority on Wednesday after two-thirds of the votes were counted in Israel’s pivotal general election . Voters turned out in the highest numbers in decades to give their verdict on Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, who has pushed the country sharply to the right and unleashed a wave of wars in response to Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack . Following the vote, both Netanyahu and his main rival Gadi Eisenkot vowed to form a government despite neither being projected to win a majority. With 66 per cent of ballots counted, Netanyahu’s bloc was shown to have 54 of the 120 seats in the parliament. Eisenkot’s opposition bloc had 48 seats and the country’s non-aligned Arab parties 18. The partial results are likely to change as more votes are counted.

Exit polls had shown that Eisenkot, a former military chief and political novice, and his opposition bloc were neck-and-neck with Netanyahu’s hard-right camp, with both winning about 51 seats, well away from the threshold for a majority. The strongest gains went to Arab Israeli parties whose voters turned out in soaring numbers against Netanyahu, who has relentlessly warned that the minority would dilute the Jewish nationalist direction in which he has taken Israel. The partial results suggest that Eisenkot’s bloc would have enough seats for a majority if it entered into a coalition agreement with the Arab parties, something most of its members expressed reluctance to do on the campaign trail. But Yair Golan, the head of Israel’s main left-wing party, which is part of Eisenkot’s camp, called for precisely that on Wednesday. “We must no longer accept Netanyahu’s racist division between Jewish votes and Arab…