Israelis voted on Tuesday in the highest numbers since 1999, and exit polls gave no bloc a path to a governing majority — with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s camp projected to fall from 68 seats to 50.
Turnout reached 77.7%, with 5.69 million of 7.33 million eligible voters casting ballots, Al Jazeera reported. That is 7.1 percentage points above the 2022 election’s 70.63%, and the highest since 1999, when turnout was 78.7%.
The projected arithmetic
The Knesset has 120 seats, and 61 are needed for a majority. The exit-poll projections reported by both outlets divide it exactly:
| Bloc | Projected seats |
|---|---|
| Gadi Eisenkot’s bloc | 52 |
| Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc | 50 |
| Arab parties | 18 |
The three figures sum to 120, the full chamber. Al Jazeera gave Eisenkot’s bloc a range of 52–53; CNN’s account, citing Israel’s Channel 12 News, gives 52, and 52 is the figure consistent with the other two numbers and the size of the Knesset.
CNN reports the headline change as a collapse in Netanyahu’s camp — from 68 seats in the outgoing Knesset to 50. Eisenkot, a former military chief of staff, leads narrowly but, as CNN puts it, is “short of a clear path to power.”
What the parties said
- Yair Lapid, the opposition leader: “The Netanyahu bloc has suffered a crushing defeat. This is a total collapse.”
- Gideon Saar, the foreign minister, for Likud: “Likud is the largest party in Israel.” — a claim about the single largest party, which is not the same as the bloc arithmetic above.
- Mansour Abbas, leader of Ra’am: “We will transform the mandate we received into a new reality.” Arab parties, projected at 18 seats, were celebrating.
Eisenkot characterised the result as showing a lack of confidence in Netanyahu, who is 77.
The Sri Lankan filing, and what it caught
Hiru News reported at 11.23 p.m. Colombo time that the Israeli Central Elections Committee had recorded 66.7% turnout as of 6 p.m., against 57.7% at the same hour in 2022 — describing it as the highest recorded at that point in any Israeli election.
Both figures check out exactly against Al Jazeera’s account. The 6 p.m. snapshot and the final 77.7% are different measures of the same day, not competing claims: polling continued after 6 p.m., and the 2022 comparison figure of 57.7% is likewise an at-6 p.m. number, not that election’s final 70.63%.
Not reported
Exit polls are projections, not results. None of the filings carries a certified seat count, and Israeli exit polls have diverged from final tallies before — particularly on the smaller parties, where a single seat can decide whether a bloc reaches 61.
No filing says which parties make up either bloc, how the 18 Arab-party seats would behave in coalition arithmetic, or whether Eisenkot and Netanyahu have any overlapping potential partners. Nothing is reported on the timetable for a formal result, or on when the president would begin consulting on who should be given the mandate to form a government. Netanyahu had made no statement at the time of these filings.
A note on dating. CNN’s page carries a publication timestamp of 08:58 UTC on 27 October, which predates the close of polls and therefore the exit polls it reports — CNN updates live pages in place without restamping them. This desk has recorded the same behaviour on other live-event pages. The content cited above is the updated version of the page; the timestamp is the original one.
