Israeli President Isaac Herzog said he will decide on Sunday which lawmaker to task with forming the next government after factions representing 67 members of the 120-seat Knesset recommended Yashar party leader Gadi Eisenkot, a former military chief, compared with 46 who backed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Herzog completed consultations with all elected factions on Thursday but said the recommendation tally did not establish which candidate could assemble a viable coalition.
“The results of the consultations may appear clear, but the authority vested in me by law is to determine who has the ability to form a government, and that is not entirely clear,” Herzog said, citing mutual vetoes between and within political blocs.
He said he would hold further talks with party leaders before assigning the mandate.
Results certified by the Central Elections Committee gave Likud 27 seats, making it the largest single party, while Netanyahu’s broader bloc secured 53 seats.
Four Jewish-led parties opposed to Netanyahu won 48 seats and the two Arab-led parties 19, according to Reuters. Without the Arab-led parties, neither bloc reaches the 61 seats required for a parliamentary majority.
Eisenkot’s recommendations include Ra’am and the Joint List, the two Arab-led factions, but their backing does not amount to participation in a governing coalition.
In June 2021 Ra’am became the first independent Arab-led party to join an Israeli governing coalition in decades, under Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid.
Eisenkot said before the election that Ra’am would not join a government he leads; like Netanyahu, he has so far ruled out forming a government with either Arab-led party, Reuters reported. Yisrael Beytenu leader Avigdor Liberman, who recommended Eisenkot, said on October 15, according to Ynet: “We will not support any minority government, not even a temporary minority government.”
United Torah Judaism, a seven-seat ultra-Orthodox party and longtime Netanyahu ally, declined to recommend either candidate on Thursday. The party left Netanyahu’s government in July 2025 over its failure to pass a law exempting ultra-Orthodox men from military service.
Under Israel’s Basic Law: The Government, the president assigns the task of forming a government after consulting parliamentary factions.
The chosen lawmaker receives 28 days to form a coalition, with the president able to grant an extension of up to 14 days. If Herzog assigns the mandate on Sunday, the deadline would fall on December 6, or December 20 with the full extension.
The outgoing government remains in office until a new government is formed.
The coalition negotiations are taking place as Netanyahu and his Likud party cast doubt on the vote. Netanyahu has cited an official investigation into possible vote tampering and accused Arab-led parties of stealing the vote, Reuters reported; he denies trying to undermine the results. Likud said, without giving evidence, that Arab-led parties “stole” the election, AP reported.
Joint List leader Yousef Jabareen said on November 1 that Netanyahu “reverts to his familiar tactic: racist incitement and the delegitimization of the Arab public,” while Eisenkot accused him of an “orchestrated and organized campaign to delegitimize the election results.”
Israel’s Central Elections Committee said Wednesday that a review of protocols from 9,069 polling stations, according to the Times of Israel, found no irregularities indicating that the integrity of the election had been compromised or that the results had been altered.
Committee chairman and Supreme Court Justice Noam Sohlberg said allegations concerning election interference remained under investigation but could not justify obstructing publication of the results or the transfer-of-power process.