Israel Election: Every Scenario From Here

Counted figures are partial, not final. A record pile of soldiers’ and other “double envelope” ballots is counted tonight into Thursday. Official results are due by November 4.

Where the count stands

With all regular ballots counted — only the double envelopes still outstanding — the Central Elections Committee’s tally puts Netanyahu’s bloc at 53 seats, the parties running against him at 48, and the Arab parties at 19 — the biggest Arab result in Israel’s history.

That is a real move from the exit polls, which had Netanyahu at 50. As the count came in, his bloc climbed as high as 56 in the early partial tallies — then eased back as more Arab votes were counted, settling at 53 with the regular ballots done.

But 53 is still not 61. Nobody can form a government yet.

More than 600,000 ballots are still uncounted — a record number. They are the “double envelopes”: soldiers, diplomats, prisoners, hospital patients, and people evacuated from their homes by the war. They get counted tonight into Thursday. In past elections they leaned toward the right, and they can move a few seats between the blocs.

Turnout was 77.7 percent — the highest since 1999.

The scenarios

From here, there are six ways this can go.

Scenario 1: Eisenkot builds a government with Arab support from outside

His bloc has 48 seats. If the Arab parties agree to let his government stand — voting with it from outside, without joining it — the math works. Yair Golan, a leader in Eisenkot’s bloc, already said it out loud: “A government of change can be formed with the Arab parties.”

The catch: Eisenkot spent the campaign saying his government would not be built on Arab parties’ votes. Outside support, with no Arab ministers, is the gray area — and both sides are already pointing at it.

Scenario 2: One wide government — without Netanyahu

Eisenkot’s stated plan is a single broad government: right, center, and left together. The version with the numbers may be Likud joining without its leader. That means Likud setting Netanyahu aside and picking someone else.

Parties do remove leaders who become the obstacle. Whether Likud dares to do it to Netanyahu is the question.

Scenario 3: Netanyahu peels off defectors

This is the oldest Netanyahu move there is: if the bloc across from you will not move, buy the pieces of it that will. He needs 8 seats. Not a party — eight individual lawmakers, peeled away one deal at a time.

The price is known, because he has paid it before: ministries, committee chairs, budget promises, and for men with legal troubles of their own, the hope of protection. Netanyahu has built and rebuilt governments this way for decades — one lawmaker at a time, until the other side’s majority is not a majority anymore.

Why it is hard this time: eight is a lot. Defectors usually move one or two at a time, and they move toward power — toward a government that is actually forming. Right now Netanyahu cannot show them one. The parties across from him also ran on a single shared promise — never under Netanyahu — and Eisenkot repeated it on election night: resign within the hour, no government with him, ever. Every lawmaker who crosses would be breaking the promise they were just elected on, in public, in the first week.

Possible. Not likely. But if names start leaking — a meeting here, a phone call there — this is the scenario to watch, because it is the one Netanyahu himself knows how to run.

Scenario 4: Netanyahu turns to the Arab parties

This road looks closed — but it has been driven before, by him. In 2021, Netanyahu’s own camp negotiated for weeks with Mansour Abbas and Ra’am. The deal was real: budgets for Arab towns, a plan against the crime wave in Arab communities, a seat at the table. It died because Netanyahu’s far-right partners refused to sit with an Arab party — not because Abbas refused him.

So why is it dead now? Partly the same wall: Ben Gvir and Smotrich would rather bring the house down than govern with Arab support, and without them Netanyahu has no bloc at all. Partly Abbas himself: he ran this election on ending Netanyahu, and said on election night that he will not join a Netanyahu government. And partly Netanyahu’s own words — overnight he said a government backed by the Arab parties is out of the question.

And yet: Abbas also said on election night, “Everyone is speaking with us — not just from the change bloc.” People from Netanyahu’s side are already calling him. That story is told in full further down this page.

Dead on both sides, then — in public. In private, the phone is already ringing.

Scenario 5: Nobody gets to 61 — another election

If every road fails, Israel votes again. And Netanyahu stays prime minister the whole time — caretaker, unremoved, his shield intact. News agencies made the point plainly this morning: a deadlock keeps him in the chair. For Netanyahu, losing slowly is still a kind of survival.

Scenario 6: The soldiers’ votes move the edges

The double envelopes can shift a few seats — enough to make every scenario above easier or harder. What they cannot do, all by themselves, is hand anyone 61. By Thursday night, the picture should be nearly final.

But watch how the soldiers themselves voted, because the usual assumption may not hold this time. In 2022, the envelope vote leaned right — Likud took more of those ballots than anyone. This year’s envelopes were cast by a different army: soldiers and reservists after three years of war, called up again and again, while the ultra-Orthodox parties in Netanyahu’s coalition fought to keep their own young men out of uniform. About a quarter of Jewish voters told pollsters the draft exemption was a key issue in this election. The Israel Democracy Institute’s president called it probably the number one issue for the anti-Netanyahu camp.

And there is a darker number underneath. Twenty-two soldiers died by suicide in 2025 — the highest figure in 15 years, and combat soldiers made up most of the military’s suicide deaths. The army itself ties the rise to how long people are now serving, especially in the reserves.

Across from Netanyahu stands Eisenkot: a former army chief who lost his son and two nephews in Gaza, and whose signature promise is that everyone serves. If any electorate was going to break its old pattern, it is this one. Netanyahu may get fewer of tonight’s votes than the old math assumes.

The Arab parties hold the keys

However the envelopes land, one fact does not move: the Arab parties won 19 seats — the most they have ever won. That makes them the ones who decide what happens next.

Here is why. Netanyahu’s side has 53 seats. He needs 61. That means he needs 8 more seats from somewhere, and the Arab parties are the only group big enough to give them to him. Eisenkot’s side has 48 — even with one Arab party behind him, he still falls short; he needs both, or one of them plus defectors of his own.

But look at how they campaigned. Both Arab lists ran on one main promise: bring Netanyahu down. Mansour Abbas, who leads one of them — Ra’am — said out loud that he would not join a government with Netanyahu. On election day, Abbas said it plainly: “Our vote will change the government.” The Joint List’s chairman, Yousef Jabareen, said the day after the vote that anyone who wants a real alternative to Netanyahu’s “government of bloodshed” will have to talk to them — and named the choice: “either continued racism, continued exclusion and continued supremacy, or genuine Jewish-Arab partnership.”

Netanyahu spent the campaign warning his own voters that the other side would need Arab support. He used the Arab parties as a scarecrow. Now his only road back to 61 runs through them.

So the people Netanyahu needs most are the people who ran against him hardest. The chances they turn around and save him are very low.

That is what makes them the deciders. They can back the other side from outside, as a safety net — with conditions: the war, the occupation, how Arab citizens are treated, money for their towns. They can back nobody, and force another election. The one thing they promised their voters not to do is keep Netanyahu in power.

Everyone is speaking with us

The fight over who governs started before the count was even finished — and it runs straight through the Arab parties.

The phone is already ringing

Mansour Abbas leads Ra’am, one of the two Arab parties. On election night, he told Channel 12 something that tells you where the power sits now:

“Everyone is speaking with us, not just from the ’change bloc’.”

People from both sides have approached him — the parties trying to remove Netanyahu, and figures from Netanyahu’s own camp. Abbas says he is open to joining a government led by Gadi Eisenkot. He also said, honestly, that on election night the numbers for a government were not there yet.

The count has since made the Arab parties bigger, not smaller: 19 seats between them, the most ever.

The Joint List is talking, too

The second Arab party is the Joint List, led by Yousef Jabareen. He said on Channel 13 today that anyone who wants to offer a real alternative to what he called Netanyahu’s “government of bloodshed” will have to talk to his party.

His framing was blunt: “It is either continued racism, continued exclusion and continued supremacy, or genuine Jewish-Arab partnership.”

The Joint List has said it could let an anti-Netanyahu government stand — supporting it from outside, without joining it. Its support would come with conditions, tied to its platform: the war, the occupation, and the treatment of Arab citizens inside Israel.

The math problem

Here is what the count has done to Eisenkot.

His bloc holds 48 seats. He needs 61. The Arab parties hold 19 together — but neither one gets him there alone. Ra’am by itself is too small. The Joint List by itself is too small. He needs both, or one of them plus somebody else entirely.

And Netanyahu? His bloc holds 53, and he has publicly closed the Arab door himself — he says a government backed by Arab parties is out of the question. Which is what makes Abbas’s phone ringing from Netanyahu’s side so interesting. In public: never. In private: calls. It has happened before — in 2021, Netanyahu’s camp negotiated with Abbas, until Netanyahu’s far-right partners killed it.

The wall inside the opposition

The biggest obstacle to a deal is not between the opposition and the Arab parties. It is inside the opposition itself.

Avigdor Lieberman, whose Yisrael Beiteinu party Eisenkot needs, has said it flatly: “We will not support any minority government, not even a temporary minority government. We need a Zionist majority government, period.” Bennett and Lapid, running together, say the same: Zionist parties only — no government resting on Arab votes or Arab abstentions.

Yair Golan, who leads the Democrats, is on the other side of his own bloc: he says a government of change can be formed with the Arab parties, and his party is ready to negotiate with everyone.

Eisenkot himself has not ruled out a minority government held up by Arab support from outside. But he has conditions for any partner: recognize Israel as a Jewish state, and recognize Hamas as a terrorist organization that must be dismantled. Abbas can meet those conditions — he already has. The Joint List, for the most part, cannot.

What the Arab parties will ask

None of this is formal yet. These are soundings — calls, messages, trial balloons. The official process starts when the final results are published, by November 4: the president consults every party, then hands one leader the job of building a government.

When that happens, the Arab parties will name their price. Ra’am wants what it won in 2021: real budgets for Arab towns, a serious fight against the crime epidemic, a seat at the table. The Joint List wants policy: on the war, on the occupation, on equality.

Two parties that spent decades being treated as untouchable now hold the one thing everybody else needs. The conversation has started. What it produces is the whole story of the next month.

The winner’s plan

This section is from last night’s election-night article — written when the exit polls had Eisenkot’s bloc ahead, 52 to 53 seats against Netanyahu’s 50. The real count has since moved in front of him — Netanyahu’s bloc 53, his 48 — so read it for what it is: the plan of the man who was winning last night, and who still governs if he finds his way to 61.

The man whose side finished ahead in the exit polls is Gadi Eisenkot, a former army chief. He is already talking about what he does next. None of it is a surprise — this is the plan he ran on, and he repeated the main pieces on election day.

Take power fast

Eisenkot says Netanyahu’s role ends as soon as the results are in, and the next government should be put together quickly — not after months of games.

Build one wide government

He wants one big coalition of the parties that ran against Netanyahu — right, center, and left together — what he calls a government of the Zionist majority. He has said he will never sit in a government led by Netanyahu. And he has said he will not build his government on the Arab parties’ votes.

Move even without 61

Eisenkot has said it plainly: even if his side falls short of a majority, they will still work to remove Netanyahu and form a government, rather than hand him another term.

An official inquiry into October 7

This is his signature promise. A state commission of inquiry into how October 7 happened — set up right away. Netanyahu refused to allow one for three years. Eisenkot says the truth comes first.

End Hamas rule in Gaza

Within 18 months of taking office, Eisenkot pledges, Hamas will no longer rule Gaza or hold real military power there. He repeated that promise on election day, standing in one of the towns Hamas attacked.

Everyone serves

He vows no compromise on the draft law: ultra-Orthodox men will be called up for military service like everyone else, the way the courts have ordered.

The road from here

None of it starts formally until the results are official — due by November 4. Then President Herzog calls each party in, hears who it recommends, and hands one man the job of building a government. That man gets 28 days, with a possible 14 more. If he fails, the job can pass to a second candidate for 28 days. After that, any lawmaker who can gather 61 signatures gets a short window to try. If nobody succeeds, Israel goes back to elections — and through all of it, Netanyahu remains caretaker prime minister.

One caution from last night still holds: exit polls have been wrong before, and the real count has already moved once. But on the number that matters, nothing has changed since the polls closed: nobody has 61.

What it means for America

Donald Trump endorsed Netanyahu on October 18, nine days before the vote. This morning, he took credit for the result — calling it “a big come-from-behind stalemate, or even a WIN.” He also said he has not spoken to Netanyahu since the results started coming in.

But what Trump says is the smallest part of it. If Netanyahu pulls this out — or simply refuses to fall — that is a negative outcome for the United States, for two reasons that run through this site’s whole beat.

The first is the money. Israel’s politics do not stay in Israel. The pro-Israel network is one of the largest money forces in American elections: it funds candidates, it punishes critics, and it helps construct the policies Washington produces — the aid packages, the arms sales, the vetoes. A Netanyahu who survives keeps that machine running in his image. The relationship stops being country to country. It becomes Washington’s policy toward one man.

The second is the voters. American opinion has turned. Poll after poll now shows Americans — above all younger Americans — viewing Israel unfavorably and questioning the aid that flows to it. Gaza did that. His survival pours fuel on it: in the American mind, support for Israel and support for Netanyahu fuse a little tighter every year he stays, and the pushback grows — against him, and against the relationship itself.

A different Israeli government would at least hand Washington a reset: a new face to sell the alliance to a skeptical public. Netanyahu offers the opposite — the same face, the same war, the same arrest warrant. For America’s own politics, his staying is the outcome most likely to turn a growing argument about Israel into a permanent one.

Why PoliVion is covering this at all

PoliVion covers American politics — US elections, and the money moving through them. Covering other countries’ elections is not what this site does, and this is not the start of that. Expanding everywhere would be insane, and it is not happening.

This one is different, for one reason: no other country’s politics runs through America’s like Israel’s does. Israel is the United States’ closest ally in its region. The pro-Israel money network is one of the biggest forces in US elections — it is the network this site exists to track. And Zionism shapes events far beyond one small country’s borders.

Who governs Israel is, in the end, an American politics story too. That is the only reason this page exists.

Our read

This section is PoliVion’s analysis — our reading of what the facts mean, labeled as analysis, not news.

If Netanyahu stays — as caretaker through a long deadlock, or somehow back on top — the push inside the United States against the US–Israel relationship will get stronger. Stronger than it would under any new Israeli government.

For much of America, the relationship no longer runs through Israel. It runs through him: the war, the arrest warrant from The Hague, the genocide findings. A new government would walk into Washington with a clean page. Netanyahu walks in carrying all of it, every time.

And honestly, that is fair. A country cannot ask the world to separate it from a leader it keeps finding ways to keep.

It is the same story as the shield. Every week of deadlock is a week his trial waits, his protection holds — and the pressure builds, in Jerusalem and in Washington, at the same time.

The count continues tonight. We will update when the soldiers’ votes are in. The full story of this election — the treason complaint, the warrant, and the trial — is in our election-day report, and last night’s numbers are in Election Night in Israel.