‘Go home, Ben-Gvir’: Arab parties surge to 18 seats as Israel’s exit polls leave no bloc with a majority
Exit polls from Israel’s three main broadcasters put Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc on 50 seats, the opposition led by Gadi Eisenkot on 52, and the two Arab parties on a combined 18, nearly double their outgoing total, after record Arab turnout on Tuesday.
Published 27 October 2026 · 23:12 GMT
The summary
Exit polls from Israel’s three main broadcasters put Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc on 50 seats, the opposition led by Gadi Eisenkot on 52, and the two Arab parties on a combined 18, nearly double their outgoing total, after record Arab turnout on Tuesday. Polling stations closed at 10 p.m. on Tuesday 27 October 2026, and the exit polls published by Kan 11, Channel 12 and Channel 13 converged on the same broad picture: no bloc reaches the 61 seats needed for a majority in the 120-seat Knesset.
The three lenses
- WestIsraeli and Western coverage read the night primarily as a verdict on Netanyahu.
- EastCoverage from Asia framed the election as a test of democratic participation as much as of leadership.
- Global SouthAl Jazeera’s report led with the celebration, not the coalition arithmetic, and that choice of emphasis is itself part of the story.
Key facts
- Polling stations closed at 10 p.m. on Tuesday 27 October 2026, and the exit polls published by Kan 11, Channel 12 and Channel 13 converged on the same broad picture: no bloc reaches the 61 seats needed for a majority in the 120-seat Knesset. Al Jazeera (Oct 27, 2026)
- The updated exit polls give Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc 50 seats, Gadi Eisenkot’s opposition bloc 52, and the Arab parties 18 between them; the Joint List on 11 and Ra’am on 7. Times of Israel (Oct 27, 2026)
- Overall turnout reached 77.7% by 10 p.m., or 5,695,682 voters, the highest at that hour since 1999; it had already stood at 74.3% by 8 p.m., with 5,449,277 ballots cast from 7,331,981 eligible voters. Türkiye Today (Oct 27, 2026)
- Arab turnout surged in town after town: Sakhnin reached 86.8%, Kafr Qasim 84.9% and Rahat 82%, against 68.4%, 66.9% and 60.6% respectively in the 2022 election. Ynet (Oct 27, 2026)
- At the Joint List headquarters in Nazareth, supporters cheered the projections and chanted “Go away, Ben-Gvir”, while party chair Yousef Jabareen said his party hoped to send “Bibi, Smotrich, and the bloodstained government home”. Times of Israel (Oct 27, 2026)
- The two Arab parties held 10 seats between them in the outgoing Knesset, five each; the projected 18 would be their largest combined bloc in years, and it makes them arithmetically indispensable to either side. Jerusalem Post (Oct 27, 2026)
What did the exit polls show on election night?
When polling stations closed at 10 p.m. on Tuesday, Israel’s first election since the October 7 attacks of 2023 produced a result that was decisive in one respect and deadlocked in another. The voters, on the broadcasters’ projections, ended Benjamin Netanyahu’s majority without handing one to anyone else. Kan 11, Channel 12 and Channel 13, after their updates, all landed on the same split: 50 seats for the prime minister’s bloc, 52 for the opposition bloc led by former army chief Gadi Eisenkot, and 18 for the Arab parties. The 61-seat line for a Knesset majority sits beyond every bloc’s reach. At the Joint List headquarters in Nazareth, the numbers were greeted as a victory in themselves. Supporters clapped and chanted “Go away, Ben-Gvir”, a reference to National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, and party chair Yousef Jabareen told the room his party hoped to send “Bibi, Smotrich, and the bloodstained government home”.
How do the numbers break down, party by party?
The headline split hides a more detailed picture, and it is worth stating precisely, because one figure in circulation is easy to misread. The 18 is the combined Arab total, not the Joint List alone: the Joint List is projected at 11 seats and Ra’am, the United Arab List, at 7. In the outgoing Knesset the two parties held five seats each, so the projection nearly doubles their combined strength. Likud remains the largest single party, on 24 or 25 seats depending on the broadcaster, ahead of Eisenkot’s Yashar on 21 to 23. Naftali Bennett’s Beyachad is projected at 12 or 13, the Democrats at 9 or 10, and Yisrael Beiteinu at 8. The ultra-Orthodox parties fall back: Shas and United Torah Judaism are projected at 6 seats each, 12 between them against 18 last time. Turnout explains much of the movement. The Central Elections Committee put overall turnout at 74.3% by 8 p.m., with 5,449,277 ballots cast, and at 77.7% by 10 p.m., or 5,695,682 voters; the highest at that hour since 1999. In Arab communities the surge was sharper still: Sakhnin reached 86.8%, Kafr Qasim 84.9% and Rahat 82%, each far above its 2022 figure. Read alongside the election-day coverage, the night looks less like a single upset than like the end of a campaign in which the Arab vote, long treated as a footnote, became the story.
What could still change once the votes are counted?
Everything in this story, for now, is a projection. Exit polls in Israel are usually a reliable guide, but they are not results, and the counting process itself is expected to take days: the first official batches were due in the early hours of Wednesday, while absentee ballots, including soldiers’ votes, could stretch the count towards Friday. Those late ballots matter most at the margins, and the margins are where this election will be decided. Parties projected at six or seven seats, such as Religious Zionism and Otzma Yehudit, could move by a seat in either direction, and a single seat changes the arithmetic for everyone. Nor is it known how President Isaac Herzog will weigh the competing claims when consultations begin: Netanyahu leads the largest party, while Eisenkot leads the larger bloc, and each can plausibly claim the first right to try.
Why does an 18-seat Arab bloc change Israeli politics?
The significance of the night is not only that a government fell short, but who made it fall short. Arab citizens of Israel, about a fifth of the population, have voted at far lower rates than Jewish citizens in recent elections, and their parties have been treated by both blocs as parties to be kept out of government rather than partners in it. A combined 18 seats reverses that arithmetic: 52 plus 18 is 70, and 50 plus 18 is 68, so the Arab parties hold the balance whichever way the negotiation turns. That is why the celebration in Nazareth and the reaction from the far right both matter. Smotrich, whose Religious Zionism party is projected at six or seven seats, told his own supporters that he could see Arabs celebrating and that “we won’t let them celebrate”. The exchange captures the contest now opening: one side treating the Arab vote as a democratic fact to be reckoned with, the other treating it as a result to be contained. For readers following the region in the barometer, the election also decides who will handle the next phase of Gaza’s stabilisation and the wider security questions that dominated the campaign. The full record of the campaign sits in the archive.
What does the arithmetic actually allow?
Strip away the celebration and the counter-celebration, and the negotiation has only a few shapes. The first is a minority government backed from outside by one or both Arab parties: Eisenkot’s 52 plus the Arab 18 reaches 70, a comfortable majority on paper, but it requires a party that campaigned on a “Zionist government committed to universal conscription” to govern with the votes of parties it promised not to include, and it requires the Arab parties to support a government they do not join. The second is a unity arrangement between the two large blocs, an option exit-poll commentators raised precisely because the Arab path is so fraught; Likud and Yashar together hold roughly half the Knesset, and with Bennett’s Beyachad they approach a majority without any Arab vote. The third is failure, and it is not theoretical: Israel held five elections between 2019 and 2022 for exactly this reason, with Netanyahu remaining as caretaker throughout. The Arab parties’ strength cuts both ways in that calculation. It gives them leverage they have never held, and it gives every other party a reason to prefer a deal that bypasses them.
What happens to the argument over the Arab vote itself?
One second-order fight is already visible, and it concerns the legitimacy of the votes just cast. The Jerusalem Post reported that Likud’s election-integrity headquarters said it had received 620 reports of unusual incidents and suspected irregularities at polling stations in the Arab sector, collected through more than 1,500 representatives. Ra’am rejected the claims, saying activists had been arrested at their homes hours before polls opened, not near polling stations, and calling the arrests an attempt to suppress turnout as part of Ben-Gvir’s political use of the police. That dispute will now run alongside the coalition talks, and it has a clear function: if the Arab surge can be cast as tainted, the pressure to rely on it eases. A second consequence falls on the ultra-Orthodox parties, whose combined fall from 18 seats to a projected 12 reflects disillusionment over the conscription draft.
When will Israel know who governs?
The calendar now takes over from the campaign. Counting continues through the week, with absentee ballots last, and the new Knesset is due to convene on 10 November, according to reports of the election timetable. Once the final results are certified, President Herzog will consult every party that entered the Knesset and give the mandate to the candidate he judges most likely to build a majority; the formal moment when the exit polls’ arithmetic becomes a political choice. Watch three signals in that process. The first is whether Eisenkot repeats his pre-election red lines on the Arab parties once he holds the mandate, or whether outside support is presented as a different thing from coalition membership. The second is whether Netanyahu, as leader of the largest party, is given the first attempt despite leading the smaller bloc. The third is the tone of the Arab parties themselves: celebration was the mood of election night, but negotiation rewards patience, and the Joint List and Ra’am will have to decide whether their 18 seats are best spent as a bloc, separately, or held in reserve.
The three lenses
West Lens:
Israeli and Western coverage read the night primarily as a verdict on Netanyahu. The Times of Israel’s live coverage recorded opposition leader Yair Lapid calling the result a “crushing defeat” for the prime minister’s bloc, and Eisenkot himself saying the preliminary figures showed a “complete lack of confidence” in Netanyahu and the government formed after October 7. In that framing, the Arab surge is the mechanism of the verdict rather than its subject: the voters who punished the government most clearly were the ones who had previously stayed away.
East Lens:
Coverage from Asia framed the election as a test of democratic participation as much as of leadership. The Indian Express’s live coverage, published through election day, had flagged the Arab turnout drive in advance: organisers were pushing for 70%, a level not seen in decades, after a legal fight in which the High Court overturned a Central Elections Committee ban on the Arab slates. That background matters, because it makes the night’s turnout figures, 86.8% in Sakhnin, 84.9% in Kafr Qasim, read as the payoff of a mobilisation campaign rather than a polling accident.
South Lens:
Al Jazeera’s report led with the celebration, not the coalition arithmetic, and that choice of emphasis is itself part of the story. Its headline carried the Nazareth chant, “Go home, Ben-Gvir”, and its account stressed the optimism among Arab voters that the result could give them a role in the next government, quoting a former lawmaker’s declaration that “Ben-Gvir is out”. Türkiye Today’s account struck a similar note from a different angle, describing supporters at the Joint List headquarters bursting into whistles and applause as the projections appeared, chanting “Ben-Gvir out” and dancing.
The consensus
- What we agree on
- What we agree on: the three main broadcasters’ exit polls agree that Netanyahu’s bloc wins 50 seats, Eisenkot’s opposition bloc wins 52, and the Arab parties win 18 between them; that overall turnout was the highest in decades; and that no bloc reaches 61 on its own.
- What we don't agree on
- What we disagree on: what the Arab surge means for government formation. The opposition reads it as a mandate to replace Netanyahu, while his allies, including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, insist the Arab parties will not be allowed to decide the outcome; a question the exit polls themselves cannot settle.
- What we know
- What we know: the exit-poll seat splits, the turnout figures at 8 p.m. and 10 p.m., the Arab-community turnout surges, the celebration at the Joint List headquarters, and the public positions both blocs took before the vote against governing with the Arab parties.
- What we don't know yet
- What we do not know: the final, counted result; how far soldier and absentee ballots will move the small parties near the threshold; which candidate President Isaac Herzog will ask to form a government; and whether any government can be built with Arab support from outside a coalition.
- What we expect
- What we expect: days of counting, with the first official batches followed by a slower count of absentee ballots; formal consultations with the president; and a negotiation in which the Arab parties’ 18 seats are the number every other calculation must pass through.
Questions, answered
What did Israel’s exit polls project?
Kan 11, Channel 12 and Channel 13 all projected the same broad result: Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc on 50 seats, Gadi Eisenkot’s opposition bloc on 52, and the Arab parties on 18 between them. No bloc reaches the 61 seats needed for a majority in the 120-seat Knesset, so coalition talks will decide the next government.
How many seats did the Arab parties win?
The Arab parties are projected at 18 seats combined: the Joint List on 11 and Ra’am, the United Arab List, on 7. That nearly doubles their outgoing total of 10 seats, five each. The figure of 18 is the combined Arab total, not the Joint List’s alone, and it makes the Arab parties arithmetically indispensable to either bloc.
Why was Arab turnout so high?
Arab communities turned out in record numbers after a mobilisation drive that followed a court battle over the Arab slates. Sakhnin reached 86.8%, Kafr Qasim 84.9% and Rahat 82%, each far above its 2022 figure. Overall turnout hit 77.7% by 10 p.m., the highest at that hour since 1999, with 5,695,682 voters.
What happens next in Israel?
Votes are still being counted, with absentee ballots expected to take the process towards Friday. President Isaac Herzog will then consult the parties that entered the Knesset and give the mandate to the candidate he judges most likely to form a government. The new Knesset is due to convene on 10 November.
Sources
- Al Jazeera (Oct 27, 2026)
- Times of Israel (Oct 27, 2026)
- Türkiye Today (Oct 27, 2026)
- Ynet (Oct 27, 2026)
- Jerusalem Post (Oct 27, 2026)