The Latest: Israelis vote in a tense election seen as a referendum on Netanyahu
Israelis were voting Tuesday in a tense national election widely seen as a referendum on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's leadership since the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel and the wars that have since shaken the Middle East.
Israelis vote for parties, which then form alliances to create a majority coalition. No single party has ever won a 61-seat majority in the 120-member parliament, known as the Knesset.
Opinion polls suggest a tight race, with no clear winner expected, setting the stage for weeks or even months of negotiations among around a dozen parties expected to win seats in the Knesset.
Here is the latest:
Heading into the final hours of voting, Israel’s Central Elections Committee’s latest update shows nearly 67% of eligible voters cast their ballots by 6 p.m. local time. That’s the highest turnout by that point since at least 1973 and nine percentage points higher than at the same time during the last elections in 2022.
Voting is set to end at 10 p.m. local time.
Netanyahu’s party, Likud, has petitioned to extend voting hours past 10 p.m. His rival, Gadi Eisenkot, has come out opposing the bid.
“No exceptional incident has occurred that would justify granting this request, which is intended to lay the groundwork for allegations challenging the integrity of the election, continuing the lies Netanyahu has been spreading since this morning,” Eisenkot said in a statement.
A loss for Netanyahu could mean the end of his decades-long career. He is locked in a tight race with Eisenkot, his former military chief of staff.
Election Day is a national holiday in Israel, with schools, many businesses and government offices closed. Many Israelis took advantage of the mid-week vacation to barbecue with their families, hike, or hang out at the beach before threatening weather forced them inside.
More than 90,000 people visited the country’s national parks, according to Israel’s Nature and Parks Authority, though flooding in the south forced the closure of several popular parks. In Tel Aviv, people thronged to cafes and parks, and a few braved the blustery beach.
In Tel Aviv, one group of friends held a picnic and tried to recruit new members for their women’s beach footvolley team. “I really hope Bibi won’t get chosen again, that there will be real change, socially, economically, we deserve something different,” said Gal Elian, a 28-year-old architect from Tel Aviv, using a nickname for Netanyahu.
Although her whole family votes for Netanyahu, Elian said it was clear to her she needed to vote for whichever party could remove him from power.
Voter turnout has increased significantly in liberal strongholds and among voters in Arab-majority villages, according to official figures and expert Ofer Kenig.
That could spell trouble for Netanyahu’s coalition, explained Kenig, a research fellow at the Jerusalem-based think tank Israel Democracy Institute.
“The picture right now is looking encouraging for the bloc of change,” Kenig said, referring to the opposition parties. But he said Netanyahu has managed last minute upsets before.
Small parties could also be adversely impacted by the higher turnout, making it harder for them to pass an electoral threshold needed to enter parliament. If they don’t, the votes cast for them go to waste and the political bloc they are aligned with will lose out.
Hanna Swaid, a Palestinian Christian from the Galilee and former Knesset member, said four years of simmering anger toward Netanyahu was pushing turnout to record levels among both Palestinian and Jewish citizens of Israel.
Palestinian citizens make up slightly more than one-fifth of Israel’s population, but their parties have never won proportional representation in the Knesset. Even if they don’t win one-fifth of seats, picking up several could be decisive in a tight race.
Questions about Arab voter turnout have long been both an important factor in election results and a political weapon to scare and mobilize right-wing voters, Swaid said.
“Palestinian citizens want to change things and kick out the extremist ministers,” he said, referring to National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. “The only way to do that in a democratic state — as far as you can still call Israel that — is elections.”
Almost all Israelis vote in person — unlike voters in some other countries that allow mail-in or absentee voting — so many are voting in the rain today. Israel’s meteorological service reported stormy weather was hitting parts of the country, warning that conditions could worsen into thunderstorms or flash floods in some parts of the country. Thunder rolled over Jerusalem Tuesday afternoon.
Studies show that voter turnout is driven primarily by other factors. But Florida State University political scientist Yusaku Horiuchi said research suggests rain can depress voter turnout in certain contexts.
“Even a relatively small weather-related turnout effect could matter,” Horiuchi, who has researched weather and voting patterns in the United States and Japan, said.
There is little evidence that rain consistently changes election outcomes, and weather’s impact likely depends on other context. But Horiuchi said it’s possible that bad weather could keep undecided or less politically engaged voters home.
Right-wing parties had done little campaigning for votes in Arab-majority communities ahead of Israel’s election. But for some, that changed Tuesday.
Itamar Ben-Gvir of the Otzma Yehudit party and Orit Strock of the Religious Zionism party both visited Arab towns Tuesday to film videos warning their supporters about high turnout among Palestinian citizens of Israel.
“This mad rush must wake us up,” Strock said, standing behind policemen in the town of Rehat.
Ben-Gvir visited the northern Israeli town of Kafr Qasem to make a similar plea. Before Election Day, he had also filmed social media videos at the sites of Palestinian home demolitions in east Jerusalem, a shootout in the occupied West Bank and at Ofer Prison, where he boasted about the increasingly restrictive conditions Palestinian detainees have faced since he became national security minister in 2022.
“The voter turnout in the Arab sector is insane. Absolutely insane,” Ben-Gvir said in a video posted Tuesday afternoon, without providing evidence. “If you want this country to remain Jewish and Zionist … then get out and vote!”
The first downpour in months drenched Jerusalem in the evening, sending men in an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood under shelter.
At nearby Mahane Yehuda market, where Netanyahu campaigned to cheers less than a week ago, banners drooped under the heavy rain.
Nearly 56% of eligible voters cast their ballots by 4 p.m. local time, according to Israel’s Central Elections Committee.
Acting director-general of the Elections Committee Dean Livne said the turnout was the highest for the hour since officials began recording those figures in 1973. It’s also 8.2% higher than the same time in the 2022 elections.
It was too early to tell which party the high turnout might benefit. Voting is set to continue until 10 p.m. local time.
Israeli police are investigating an attack on a campaign booth for a party running to wrest control of the government from Netanyahu.
A video of the attack shows a man approaching the booth and punching two activists for The Democrats, a left-wing party led by Yair Golan, who favors partnering with Arab parties to form a majority government.
One man was knocked unconscious, according to The Democrats, who identified the attacker as a supporter of Itamar Ben-Gvir.
“We will not allow anyone to disrupt the proper conduct of the election process, and we will neither be deterred nor intimidated by threats and attacks,” The Democrats said in a statement.
A police spokesperson said the agency had identified a suspect and “takes any incitement to violence or threats seriously.”
A spokesperson for Ben-Gvir did not respond to a request for comment.
The attack followed police seizing a knife from a man in Tel Aviv earlier Tuesday, in an alleged attempt to stab Golan.
“There is no difference between Netanyahu and Eisenkot,” said Mahmoud Hamada, a resident of Khan Younis, referring to former military chief Gadi Eisenkot, a leading opposition challenger to the prime minister. “It is all part of a well-known Israeli policy.”
Ahmad Qanan, also from Khan Younis, said both candidates followed the same policies and that Palestinians could not expect genuine peace or the return of displaced people to their homes.
A ceasefire that took effect in October 2025 has failed to stop Israeli strikes. More than 1,500 Palestinians have been killed since it began, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, while the overall death toll from the war has surpassed 74,000.
Hasan al-Masri, displaced from Beit Hanoun, desperately hoped the elections would bring change to Gaza, saying, “We pray to God that these elections bring a positive outcome for us. We have been utterly devastated; nothing remains. They have killed our children, destroyed our homes, and everything we had is gone.”
Settler leaders in Netanyahu’s right-wing government echoed his remarks about the threat of Palestinian citizens of Israel turning out to vote in high numbers.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich both homed in on turnout in Arab-majority towns on social media, warning their supporters about the implications and urging them to vote. Ben-Gvir warned that high Arab turnout meant his supporters could “lose the country,” while Smotrich said he was organizing an emergency meeting at his campaign headquarters over concerns about the turnout. Neither cited evidence about turnout in Arab-majority communities.
Israelis of Palestinian Arab descent are full citizens under the law and have the right to vote. But such tactics aren’t new for Netanyahu or Israel’s right.
Families displaced by Israel’s ongoing military operation in the occupied West Bank said they had become victims of Netanyahu’s efforts to project strength during the elections.
Israel launched a military operation throughout the West Bank after Palestinian gunmen shot and killed two Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint outside Hebron on Friday. Troops subsequently cleared the suspected gunmen’s neighborhood, displacing thousands of people in a move that Palestinians said amounts to collective punishment.
“We are human beings. We have our dignity, our homes and our pride, and we will not accept being humiliated to this extent,” said Khawla Shawar, one woman whose family was displaced.
With checkpoints and military gates closed, the army has kept Hebron sealed off from the West Bank. Local officials say 780 families — almost 5,000 people — have been displaced. Israel’s military did not respond to questions about the operation’s objectives.
At a polling place in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem, two very different sectors of society were turning out to vote. Palestinian citizens of Israel and religious Jews filtered into the building to cast their ballots.
For decades, Israel’s government has sought to increase Jewish presence in this part of the city. Palestinians who live there may seek Israeli citizenship but most do not and those who don’t cannot vote.
Most Palestinians who spoke to the AP said they had voted for minority Arab parties, which could have a potentially powerful role in coalition negotiations.
Religious Jewish Israelis voting there expressed support for the issues important to them; some voted for increased West Bank Jewish settlements and others in favor of exemptions for ultra-Orthodox Jews from military conscription.
A ceasefire agreement in Gaza has not stopped what a group of independent experts commissioned by the U.N. says is genocide carried out by Israel in the territory, the team said in a new report Monday. They also accused Israeli forces of crimes against humanity, including torture and rape, in the West Bank.
The report Monday said Israel was “continuing to commit genocidal acts with the genocidal intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the Palestinians in Gaza.”
In response, Israel’s mission in Geneva called for the commission’s dissolution and said on X the report marked an example of the body’s “misinformation campaign to demonize the state of Israel and portray its very existence as criminal.”
Israel has long criticized the commission’s output and denied accusations of genocide in Gaza and sexual assault by its forces.
Almost 45% of Israelis have voted by 2 P.M., according to Israel’s Central Elections Committee, the highest voter turnout by this time in more than 50 years. Voter turnout is six percentage points higher than this time in the previous elections in 2022.
Numbers were similar for soldiers. 48% of soldiers had voted by mid-afternoon, compared with 44% by this time in the previous election, according to the Israeli military.
Acting director-general of the Elections Committee, Dean Livne, noted that several polling stations are facing exceptionally long lines, which he attributed to unprecedented voter turnout.
Israelis are turning out to vote in high numbers despite rainfall and blustery weather in parts of the country. The meteorological service said at midday that thunderstorms were developing in several parts of central and southern Israel, with a risk of flash floods.
Police reported several road closures in the south.
Palestinian citizens, whose families remained in Israel after the 1948 war surrounding the country’s creation, make up 20% of the population but have historically turned out to vote at lower rates than Jewish citizens. In Israel’s most recent election in 2022, roughly 53% voted.
Leaders of the two Arab-led slates running are hoping that frustration with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will motivate voters to turn out.
Turnout could have multiple effects on the election result and whether Netanyahu retains power.
The higher the turnout in Arab communities, the more seats their parties could win. It could also raise the number of votes required to clear the 3.25% threshold that parties must surpass to enter the Knesset, making it harder for smaller parties to win seats. That could prove decisive for smaller parties at risk of not qualifying, including Yoav Hendel’s center-right Reservists-Economic Party and Ofer Winter’s far-right Amcha Yisrael party.
If anyone would partner with them.
Netanyahu and his chief rivals have said they won’t form a coalition with any other Arab-led party after the election – even if that means months of gridlock and another round of voting.
It’s a measure of where Israel’s long-marginalized Arab minority finds itself three years after the Oct. 7 attack. Their speech is heavily policed, their leaders have been branded as traitors, and at one point their parties were outlawed before a court lifted the ban. Yet in a tight race, Arab politicians are poised to play a potentially decisive role in choosing the next prime minister — a rare opportunity to wield their influence.
Lotem Beiden Ben Aharon, 42, said she voted for Yair Golan and the Democrats because of healthcare and education. She said that under Netanyahu’s government, doctors’ appointments have become harder to come by, as more and more physicians “run away from Israel.” She moved with her daughter Geffen, 4, from the city of Rehovot to Tel Aviv for better schools, but she said teachers are being poorly paid.
“Golan seems like the best option for a change here in Israel," she said, “I’m probably going to be disappointed.”
An Israeli rights group has filed a complaint with the country’s election commission, warning that widespread delays could be suppressing the vote among Palestinian citizens of Israel.
Though delays could be a result of high voter turnout, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, or ACRI, said in its complaint to Israel’s Central Elections Committee that delays had been reported in at least 18 communities. It asked the committee to investigate “whether these delays are deliberate.”
ACRI also reported “a large presence of Israel Police and National Guard” officers at a polling station in the Negev Desert, raising concerns that officers were using crowd control as a pretext to prevent people from entering to vote.
Tareq Ahram, 36, a Palestinian lawyer in Jerusalem, lives under Israeli rule but cannot vote.
Sitting in front of his grandfather’s bakery just outside the Old City, he said that if he could vote he would vote for peace.
Israel captured east Jerusalem, along with Gaza and the West Bank, in the 1967 Mideast war. Israel annexed east Jerusalem in a move not recognized internationally and views the entire city as its capital. The Palestinians want east Jerusalem to be the capital of their future state.
Palestinians in east Jerusalem, unlike those in Gaza and the West Bank, can apply for Israeli citizenship. But most choose not to because it would recognize Israeli claims to the city. Those who do face a long and uncertain bureaucratic process.
“We Palestinian Jerusalemites are a huge bloc of people,” Ahram said. “If we could vote, it could change things.”
There are over 350,000 Palestinians in east Jerusalem.
By midday, rural areas in Israel’s south and north showed exceptionally high voter turnout in comparison with previous years, according to data released by Israel’s Central Election Committee.
Small villages around Beer Sheba, including many Bedouin villages, had already reached 40 to 50 percent voter turnout, compared with the national average of 31 percent. While the total number of votes in these villages is small, it could point towards higher-than-usual voter participation among Palestinians with Israeli citizenship. Palestinians who remained within Israel after the 1948 war surrounding its creation, and their descendants, today make up about 20% of the population, but have traditionally had low voter turnouts and sometimes boycotted national elections.
Itamar Ben-Gvir played into this fear. “Voter turnout in the Arab sector is off the charts – unprecedented!” he warned his supporters from outside the Arab town of Kfar Kassem in central Israel, encouraging them to vote for his party if they want the country to remain Zionist and Jewish.
It might even require another election.
Shortly after polls close at 10 p.m. local time (2000 GMT), Israel’s three main television broadcasters will release exit polls estimating how many seats were won by each party.
The exit polls usually provide a good indication of how people have voted. But they also could vary and may not be borne out by the official results, which will be released in the coming days.
If, as expected, neither coalition pulls off a clear victory, then the coming weeks will see intense negotiations and bargaining among party leaders as they try to get to 61 seats.
The Associated Press calls thousands of elections in the United States, but doesn’t declare winners in foreign elections.
People chanted “Our next prime minister!” after Eisenkot voted in Herziliya, a city north of Tel Aviv.
After voting, Eisenkot called on all Israelis to vote to get rid of the “the worst government Israel has known.” He said victory wasn’t certain, adding that “we are on perhaps the most critical day since the founding of the state.”'
Eisenkot grew up in southern Israel with parents who were among the more than 100,000 Jews who emigrated from Morocco in the 1950s.
If elected prime minister, he would be the first Israeli of Middle Eastern or North African descent to lead the country. The demographic, known as Mizrahim, now accounts for more than half of Israel’s Jewish population and is, on average, poorer and more conservative than Israelis of European ancestry. Mizrahim have affectionately called Eisenkot “dialna” — or “ours” in North African Arabic dialect.
Eisenkot’s last name comes from a word in Amazigh, an indigenous North African language widely spoken in Morocco, and means “antelope,” said Amazigh scholar and Williams College professor Brahim El Guabli.
He said the spellings of many Moroccan Jewish names like Eisenkot were altered upon their arrival to sound more European and help them assimilate in Israel.
After casting his ballot, Netanyahu told journalists that Arab-led parties were “heading to the polls in unprecedented numbers.”
The prime minister gave no evidence to support his claim but told supporters the stakes of the election were “securing the Jewish state, ensuring our security and safeguarding our future.”
Arab-led parties predict that motivated voters will turn out in record numbers, and AP journalists observed busy polling places in multiple Arab towns on Tuesday.
But Netanyahu has a history of using fear tactics and anti-Arab sentiment to galvanize supporters. In 2015, he warned that Arabs were heading to the polls “in droves” in an effort to scare complacent right-wing supporters into voting. In this election, Netanyahu has claimed Hamas has called on Palestinian citizens of Israel to vote to oust him and campaigned on the slogan, “Right or Palestine,” a Hebrew rhyme meant to suggest that the 77-year-old veteran leader is uniquely equipped to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.
In Jewish-majority cities and towns, billboards promoting mainstream parties like Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud and Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar are hard to miss. But they’re few and far between in predominantly Palestinian Arab cities. In Nazareth and the surrounding northern Israeli towns, posters promoting the two Arab-led slates — Ra’am and the Joint List — line the streets, reflecting the parties’ hopes for strong voter turnout in Arab communities.
Netanyahu’s face appears along highways or on rare billboards urging voters to turn out and vote against him. The stark contrast illustrates the growing isolation of Palestinian citizens of Israel, even as Arab-led parties could win enough seats to help determine the next government. Apart from Yair Golan and his left-leaning Democratic party, candidates from mainstream Jewish parties have barely campaigned in these communities.
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