Netanyahu Calls Vote ‘Stolen’ as Final Count Hands Arab Parties the Balance
Benjamin Netanyahu lost his parliamentary majority. His party answered by attacking the voters who denied it to him.
Israel’s completed election count gave Netanyahu’s right-wing bloc 53 of the Knesset’s 120 seats, down sharply from the 68 seats it controlled at its peak in the outgoing parliament. Gadi Eisenkot’s opposition bloc won 48. The Joint List and Ra’am, two Arab-led parties, captured the remaining 19 seats after a surge in Palestinian-citizen turnout.
Those numbers leave no bloc with the 61 seats required to govern. They also place Arab-led parties at the center of the coalition struggle. Instead of accepting that political reality, Likud escalated an unsupported campaign to discredit the result.
“The elections in Israel have been stolen!” Likud declared, according to the Associated Press. The party claimed foreign interference sought to engineer an “Islamization of Israel” and remove the right from power. It offered no public evidence for that charge. Israeli media reported that Likud figures pointed toward Qatar, which called the accusation “ridiculous and dangerous.”
Election officials drew a clear line between a limited security inquiry and Likud’s sweeping claims. Supreme Court Justice Noam Sohlberg, who chairs the Central Elections Committee, asked the Shin Bet to examine classified information about possible foreign interference. But the committee said allegations of systematic violations were baseless. Its acting director, Dean Livne, said the inquiry neither changes the final count nor targets any particular community.
That distinction matters. Reuters reported that Netanyahu escalated his attacks after high Arab turnout blocked an easy path to power. Likud has tried to turn an unverified intelligence question into a political indictment of nearly two million Palestinian citizens of Israel. The final turnout reached 77.9 percent, the highest in decades. Arab voters used that election to nearly double their representation from 10 seats to 19. Netanyahu’s answer has been to portray their participation as a threat.
This is not simply post-election anger. It is a strategy. Netanyahu needs to make cooperation with Arab parties appear illegitimate before Eisenkot can test whether their votes could remove him from office.
The arithmetic exposes the pressure. Netanyahu cannot reach 61 seats without persuading parties from outside his bloc to defect. Eisenkot cannot reach a majority with the 48 seats held by his Jewish-led opposition partners. The Joint List and Ra’am therefore hold the balance, whether through a formal coalition, outside support for a minority government or parliamentary votes that replace the Knesset speaker and control the chamber’s agenda.
Netanyahu has branded such cooperation treasonous. Eisenkot has left the door partly open, though several of his partners campaigned against relying on Arab parties. Small demonstrations in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem have now demanded a Jewish-Arab coalition to block Netanyahu’s return.
The stakes go far beyond who receives the first mandate to form a government. Netanyahu remains prime minister while coalition talks proceed. Losing office could expose him to sharper pressure over his corruption trial and over demands for a formal inquiry into the failures that preceded the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023. His government’s far-right allies also face voters angry over years of war, displacement and political crisis.
President Isaac Herzog called the dispute a “sensitive moment” and demanded that authorities investigate credible evidence. He also warned leaders not to “tarnish an entire community that sought to exercise its right to vote and take an active part in democracy.” That warning names the danger more honestly than Likud’s propaganda.
Palestinian citizens did not steal the election. They voted in record political numbers and shattered the old parliamentary balance. Likud’s attack attempts to convert that democratic fact into suspicion, hoping fear will achieve what the ballot box did not.
Israel now faces weeks of coalition bargaining and possibly another election if no government emerges. But one fact is already settled: Arab-led parties won 19 seats, Netanyahu lost his majority, and the attempt to erase that result began before the final count had even finished.
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