Israel's parliament is deadlocked after the October 27 election, with neither Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition nor the opposition alliance reaching the 61 seats needed for a majority, according to Al Jazeera. Netanyahu's camp finished first with 53 seats, five ahead of the main opposition bloc. Turnout was among the highest in decades, with about 2.38 million Israelis voting for the Netanyahu-led bloc and roughly 2.21 million for the opposition.
Arab parties won a record 19 seats but have been left on the sidelines of coalition negotiations, Al Jazeera reports.
Why it matters
The result leaves no clear path to a governing majority at a time when Israel faces several unresolved pressures at once. Netanyahu remains on trial in a corruption case that dates back to 2019, and the alleged failures surrounding the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023 have not been formally examined despite sustained public demand. The judicial changes his government introduced from 2022 triggered the largest street protests in the country's history. Internationally, the war in Gaza has deepened Israel's isolation, and a February operation against Iran conducted with the United States continues to affect global energy markets.
An election fought on domestic ground
According to Al Jazeera, neither Gaza nor the occupied West Bank played a decisive role in how Israelis voted, largely because both areas sit within a broad consensus shared by the two main blocs. The campaign instead turned on internal questions: the authority of Israel's courts, whether ultra-Orthodox citizens should be exempt from military service, and whether the government should be held to account for missing warnings ahead of the October 2023 attack.
Al Jazeera reports that Israeli attacks in Gaza have killed more than 74,500 people and left much of the territory in ruins. On Monday, a United Nations commission of inquiry said Israel had committed crimes against humanity in the occupied West Bank, including extermination, torture and rape.
Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani, a leading Israeli sociologist, told Al Jazeera that the problem is not simply that voters lack information. He said many Israelis are aware that Gaza has been devastated, even though the picture they receive is highly selective, but that knowing this and accepting its moral and political consequences are different things. He described what he called a powerful mechanism of denial at work — not a denial of facts, but of what those facts mean. Ordinary people who see themselves as decent, he added, can still take part in or accept a political order that causes enormous suffering for others.
Fear, tribe and the question of security
Analyst Ahron Bregman, a senior teaching fellow at King's College London, told Al Jazeera that Likud functions for its supporters almost like a tribe, or a cult, in which the leader is treated as always right. He said that for this base, which has kept Netanyahu in power for a cumulative 19 years, the left ranks as an enemy second only to Arabs, and that they would back him whatever his faults.
Roi Zur, a voter behaviour specialist at Essex University, said turnout among Netanyahu's supporters was driven above all by the belief that the alternative coalition would be weaker on security. He credited Netanyahu with running an effective campaign of fear built on the idea that he alone is strong enough to lead the country through the current period and the war that followed October 7.
Shenhav-Shahrabani argued that war and occupation were never choices presented on the ballot. Over decades, he said, they became the lens through which Israelis view security, citizenship and the meaning of democracy itself. For that reason, he added, replacing Netanyahu — however significant — would not on its own address the deeper problem.
What to watch
With the count complete and no bloc holding a majority, attention now turns to coalition negotiations, in which the Arab parties' 19 seats will not be in play.
