Israel heads to Tuesday vote as final polls show no majority for Netanyahu
In the final polls before the Knesset election, Netanyahu’s bloc wins 50 seats and the opposition camp 52 to 56. Forming a government requires 61 of the 120 seats.
Symbolic image · Photo: Clema12 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped and resized)
Two days before Israel’s parliamentary election, everything points to a stalemate. In the final surveys by the major TV channels, published before the legal ban on polls took effect on Friday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s camp wins 50 seats in each. The opposition camp stands at 52 seats in Kan 11, 54 in Channel 13 and 56 in Channel 12. Arab parties together win 14 to 16 seats. In all three polls, Eisenkot’s Yashar party would be the largest with 22 or 23 seats, ahead of Netanyahu’s Likud with 19 to 21.
Channel 14 and i24 News, whose polls have recently been seen as outliers, paint a different picture: they give Netanyahu’s coalition an average of 61 seats. Arab turnout is also uncertain: the Stat-Net institute considers up to 68 to 69 percent possible, after about 50 percent over the past decade. According to an Israel Democracy Institute survey, 35 percent of Jewish and 46 percent of Arab Israelis would prefer a new election in the event of a stalemate.
On Saturday evening, people demonstrated in Tel Aviv for a state commission of inquiry into Oct. 7, 2023. Also in Tel Aviv, a man was arrested on suspicion of attacking the security team of opposition politician Naftali Bennett, according to The Times of Israel. Eisenkot is to receive personal protection from the Shin Bet domestic security service from Sunday, his party said.