Israel has counted 84% of the vote and still has no government

Netanyahu’s bloc has sat on 54 seats since mid-morning, seven short of a majority. Around 600,000 double envelopes — soldiers, prisoners, diplomats, hospital patients — are not counted yet, and may not be until Friday.

Where this stands. Every figure below is the Central Elections Committee’s own partial count, with the time it was published, as the Times of Israel’s liveblog recorded it. Counting has not finished and these numbers will move. This piece is a snapshot of one afternoon; the wire on the front page keeps up with it.

At 12:39 this afternoon, with 84.5% of ballot boxes counted, the bloc supporting Binyamin Netanyahu stood at 54 seats. The bloc around Gadi Eisenkot stood at 49. The Arab parties, the Joint List and Ra’am together, held 17. Sixty-one is a majority. Nobody has one.

What is striking is not the arithmetic but how little it has shifted. At 9:53 this morning Netanyahu’s bloc was credited with 56 seats. By 10:09, with 72.4% counted, it was 54. At 11:04, with 76.8% counted, it was 54. At 12:39, with 84.5% counted, it was still 54. Twelve percent of the national vote went through the count this morning and moved that bloc by nothing at all. The movement has been on the other side of the ledger, between Eisenkot’s bloc and the Arab parties — 48 and 16 at ten o’clock, 47 and 19 at eleven, 49 and 17 at half past twelve.

Three lists are sitting under the 3.25% threshold and, unless the remaining ballots lift them, will send nobody to the Knesset: Reservists on 2.7%, People of Israel on 1.6%, and Charedi Public on 0.2%. Votes cast for a list that misses the threshold elect no one.

The part nobody has opened yet

Around 600,000 double envelopes remain to be counted — the ballots cast outside a voter’s registered polling station, which in Israel means soldiers, prisoners, hospital patients, diplomats and election officials. They are counted separately and more slowly, because each one has to be checked against the roll before the inner envelope is opened at all. The Committee’s acting director has warned that the count could be delayed, and the Committee’s own estimate is that they may not be fully tallied until Friday.

Six hundred thousand is a large number against a Knesset of 120 seats, and it is the reason nobody on either side is claiming anything this afternoon. It matters most to the lists sitting just under the threshold, where a small shift decides whether a party exists in the next Knesset or not, and to the gap between 54 and 61, which no amount of patience closes on its own.

What would have to happen

A government needs 61. On the afternoon’s figures, neither bloc reaches it without crossing a line its leaders spent the campaign promising not to cross. That is the position, and it is why the next few days are about envelopes rather than speeches.

Figures: Central Elections Committee partial counts of 28 October 2026, timed as published and reported by the Times of Israel. Nothing here is projected or modelled; where a number is not yet published, it is not given.