Netanyahu bloc falls short of majority with 70 percent of Israeli votes counted
Likud remains largest party while far-right allies shrink, opposition holds 66 seats yet exit polls give no clear winner
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Israel election results live: vote count continues as exit polls suggest no clear winner
theguardian.com
With 70 percent of Israeli ballots counted — some four million votes — by 11 a.m. local time, Benjamin Netanyahu's bloc held 54 of the Knesset's 120 seats, seven short of the 61 required to govern, the Guardian's running tally showed. The exit polls' central finding stood unchanged: no clear winner.
The count had largely stopped moving for the two leading parties. Likud, at 27 seats, remained the largest single party in the country despite shedding support since the last election, while Gadi Eisenkot's Yashar held second place at 20. The shares still climbing belonged to the two Palestinian Israeli parties: their combined 19 seats include a Joint List that has nearly doubled its parliamentary presence.
Netanyahu's far-right allies slipped, with Otzma Yehudit at seven seats and Religious Zionism at six. Behind the leaders sat Bennett's Together at 11, Golan's Democrats at 8 and Yisrael Beiteinu at 8, with Shas and United Torah Judaism at 7 apiece and Ra'am at 6.
The arithmetic of removal looks decisive on paper. The camps pledged to ending Netanyahu's tenure — Eisenkot's Change bloc with 47 seats and the Palestinian parties with 19 — together command 66, five more than a majority. Yet the tallies that add those numbers list the components separately even while summing them. Netanyahu's 54 seats span five parties; the Change bloc's 47 span four, from Yashar to Yisrael Beiteinu. A bloc is an accounting category; a government is a coalition, and the negotiations that decide Israel's next prime minister now begin with every seat in the Knesset priced.
Netanyahu starts that bargaining from the prime minister's chair, with the largest parliamentary faction behind him and allies whose combined weight held. The opposition's 66 seats exist, so far, only as the sum of two columns that even the vote counters keep apart.
By 11 a.m., the base numbers for Netanyahu's and Eisenkot's parties had barely moved since the exit polls. As the count continued, the only shares still rising were the two Palestinian parties'.