Israel ElectionExit Polls Show Netanyahu With Edge in Israel’s Election

Here are the latest developments as early returns come in.

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Benjamin Netanyahu at an election-night event in Jerusalem on Tuesday.Credit...Amit Elkayam for The New York Times

JERUSALEM — Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing alliance may have won a narrow lead in Israel’s fifth election in less than four years, exit polls suggested on Tuesday night, giving him a chance of returning to power at the helm of one of the most right-wing governments in Israeli history.

Three broadcasters’ exit polls indicated that Mr. Netanyahu’s party, Likud, would finish first and that his right-wing bloc was likely to be able to form a narrow majority in Parliament.

But exit polls in Israel have been wrong before, particularly in tight races — and they exaggerated Mr. Netanyahu’s eventual tally in the last election, in March 2021.

Clearer results may not emerge until Wednesday morning, and final numbers will not be announced until Friday. Party leaders will not be asked to nominate a prime minister before next week.

If the right-wing bloc does eke out a narrow victory, it would allow Mr. Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, to return to office even as he stands trial on corruption charges.

Mr. Netanyahu’s bloc includes a far-right alliance that seeks to upend Israel’s judicial system, end Palestinian autonomy in parts of the occupied West Bank and legalize a form of corruption that Mr. Netanyahu is accused of committing. The bloc also includes two ultra-Orthodox parties that oppose the secularization of Israeli public life.

A victory for Mr. Netanyahu would also bring down the final curtain on one of Israel’s most unusual governments ever: Prime Minister Yair Lapid’s diverse eight-party alliance, which united political opponents from the right, left and center, and included the first independent Arab party to join an Israeli governing coalition.

If the exit polls prove to be correct, Israel may have ended a four-year political deadlock in which no leader could win a stable parliamentary majority, leaving the country without a national budget for long stretches and repeatedly returning Israelis to the ballot box.

For the first time since 2019, the country could be governed by a parliamentary majority formed from a single ideologically aligned bloc — reducing the risk of infighting in the coalition and the likelihood of another early election.

Adjusted projections early Wednesday morning indicated that Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud finished first, with 30 to 32 seats, while his wider right-wing bloc won 62 seats, according to all three main television channels, enough to form a narrow majority in the 120-seat Parliament.

Mr. Lapid’s centrist party, Yesh Atid, was projected to win 22 to 24 seats, and his wider alliance 54 to 55 seats. An unaligned party won the remaining seats.

That calculus could change quickly as real results come in. One Arab party, Balad, was teetering just below the electoral threshold, 3.25 percent of the total vote. Should Balad reach the threshold, analysts said, that would change all the calculations and reduce Mr. Netanyahu’s lead, potentially depriving his right-wing and ultra-Orthodox bloc of a majority.

Israel’s political gridlock began when Mr. Netanyahu’s declined to leave power after being placed under investigation on accusations of corruption. His decision left the country roughly evenly divided between voters who thought he should now stay away from politics and those who believed he should stay.

An outright victory for Mr. Netanyahu would not resolve a more protracted debate about the kind of society Israelis want — a debate that was central to the election campaign.

Mr. Netanyahu’s bloc presented the vote as a quest to preserve Israel’s Jewish character. He and his allies targeted Jewish Israelis alienated by an Arab party’s involvement in Mr. Lapid’s departing government and unsettled by a spasm of ethnic unrest between Arabs and Jews in Israeli cities last year.

By contrast, Mr. Netanyahu’s opponents presented the election as a bid to protect Israel’s liberal democracy. In particular, they warned of his dependence on a far-right alliance that has frequently antagonized Israel’s Arab minority and seeks to remove checks and balances on the lawmaking process.

Once again, Mr. Netanyahu’s fitness for office was the campaign’s defining theme. He was placed under investigation in 2016 on charges related to bribery, fraud and breach of trust.

Three elections ended inconclusively in 2019-20, leaving Mr. Netanyahu in power but unable to pass a budget, and forcing Israelis to return each time to the ballot box.

Mr. Netanyahu was ousted after a fourth election in 2021, when a former right-wing ally, Naftali Bennett, broke ranks to lead a coalition with Mr. Lapid’s centrist party and seven others, including Raam — the first Arab party to join an Israeli government.

That alliance collapsed in July amid profound ideological disagreements among its members, leading Mr. Bennett to make way for Mr. Lapid and call for another election.

Netanyahu’s party starts celebrating, even without a final count.

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Supporters of former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu celebrating at Likud’s headquarters in Jerusalem on Tuesday.Credit...Amit Elkayam for The New York Times

Political analysts warned that it was too early for the Likud party to celebrate a suggestion in exit polling that former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might return to power. Still, late Tuesday, one of the party’s lawmakers, David Amsalem, declared, “I will be the next justice minister, certainly!”

“What we have had, will be no more,” he added, referring, among other things, to political gridlock and a fragile governing coalition that he described as “full of hot air.”

“We will strengthen democracy,” Mr. Amsalem said. “We will strengthen Jewish identity. We will strengthen governance.”

Another Likud lawmaker, Miri Regev, declared the projections “a huge win for the right.”

Mr. Netanyahu’s allies on the far right were also celebrating.

Bezalel Smotrich, the leader of Religious Zionism, was carried into a hall of party activists who were singing and dancing on the shoulders of his supporters, as if he were a groom.

Mr. Smotrich told the crowd that his Religious Zionism party, which ran on a joint slate with the ultranationalist Jewish Power party, led by Itamar Ben-Gvir, had “made history.” Together, they were projected to win up to 15 seats.

“For the first time since the establishment of the state,” Mr. Smotrich said, a national religious party representing “the lovers of the land of Israel and the Torah of Israel has turned into the third-biggest party in Israel.”

“We have dreams!” Mr. Ben-Gvir told his supporters in a speech early Wednesday morning. “The time has come for us to be the landlords of our country.”

Mr. Ben-Gvir seeks to grant legal immunity to Israeli soldiers who shoot at Palestinians, and deport rival lawmakers he accuses of terrorism. Until recently, he hung a portrait in his home of Baruch Goldstein, who shot dead 29 Palestinians in a West Bank mosque in 1994.

“The public voted for a Jewish identity,” Mr. Ben-Gvir added, as his supporters chanted “death to terrorists!” in the background.

Soon after the polls closed, Likud officials warned of what they described as severe violence, threats and intimidation at polling stations in Arab areas against election observers from the right-wing camp, and called for the law enforcement authorities to intervene.

The Likud party said it was “warning of a broad effort to falsify the election results through violence,” though the party stopped short of saying it would not accept the outcome.

The elections committee rejected those assertions, saying in a statement that there was no evidence of any violence or irregularities in Arab localities and that the rumors about electoral fraud had no basis in truth.

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For Netanyahu’s corruption trial, a Jerusalem court is still surveying over 300 witnesses.

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The corruption trial of former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has barely figured in the current election campaign.Credit...Amit Elkayam for The New York Times

Much like Israel’s political morass, which is largely a byproduct of Benjamin Netanyahu’s legal troubles, the corruption trial of the former prime minister has no clear end in sight.

The Israeli electorate remains divided between Mr. Netanyahu’s supporters, who believe that he has been framed by a liberal deep state, and his diverse array of opponents, who consider him unfit to return to the office from which he was ousted 16 months ago.

Mr. Netanyahu denies all wrongdoing and says that the cases against him are collapsing in court.

The trial itself has been limping along, largely forgotten, and has been barely featured in the election campaign this time around, perhaps reflecting the fatigue of voters who are going back to the ballot box for the fifth time in under four years.

As the Jerusalem District Court makes its way through a list of more than 300 witnesses, the court proceedings rarely make headlines nowadays. Public interest has waned as the legal saga has played out.

Mr. Netanyahu was charged three years ago, after more than two years of police investigations, in three separate but interconnecting cases. They involve accusations that he gave or offered lucrative official favors to several media tycoons in exchange for favorable news coverage for him and his family, or gifts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Existing law requires an ordinary government minister to resign when under indictment but allows a prime minister to remain in office until a final court verdict, after appeals have been exhausted — a process that, at the current pace of the court proceedings, could take years.

The court is hearing all three cases in parallel, instead of one after the other, slowing down the prospect of a verdict in any of them.

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A court employee pushing a cart loaded with documents during Mr. Netanyahu’s trial at a Jerusalem courthouse last year.Credit...Pool photo by Jack Guez

About 20 witnesses have testified so far. The first witness to take the stand, in April 2021, was Ilan Yeshua, the former chief executive officer of Walla, the Hebrew news site owned by a communications tycoon at the center of the bribery charge against Mr. Netanyahu. Mr. Yeshua’s testimony went on for months.

Two former close confidants of Mr. Netanyahu who turned state witness have also testified.

The most recent testimony came from the driver of the Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan and an Australian billionaire, James Packer, who between them sent hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of gifts to the prime minister’s residence in Jerusalem and at times to the Netanyahu family’s private home in the seaside town of Caesarea, mainly in the form of a regular supply of luxury cigars and cases of Champagne.

In return, Mr. Netanyahu is accused of taking actions benefiting Mr. Milchan on a visa application, a tax exemption and a business merger.

Bezalel Smotrich, the leader of the far-right Religious Zionism party in Mr. Netanyahu’s bloc, has already announced a sweeping overhaul of the justice system that would include canceling the offenses of fraud and breach of trust from the criminal code.

Mr. Netanyahu insists that any such change would not apply to him retroactively. But to exclude him from such a legal amendment would require making him an exception under the law.

In a tight race, Palestinian Israelis could decide the result. But do they want to?

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Election posters for Arab parties in Tel Aviv on Tuesday.Credit...Atef Safadi/EPA, via Shutterstock

Israel’s Palestinian minority forms about a fifth of the population, a potentially powerful voting bloc — but polling has suggested that the country’s main Arab-led parties may not make it into Parliament.

That is partly because their ideological differences have prompted Arab leaders to split their single big-tent alliance into three factions, making it harder for each of them to cross the threshold needed to secure seats in Parliament.

But it is also because Arab voters themselves may not vote in high numbers. Many feel either despondent about discrimination, alienated by Jewish leaders or wary of validating a process that some consider a betrayal of Palestinians in the occupied territories, where Palestinians do not have the right to vote in Israeli elections.

“The claim of Israel is that it is a democracy,” said Abed Badosi, 22, a Palestinian from the central Israeli city of Baqa al-Gharbiya who had decided not to cast a ballot. “We will not allow them this platform.”

Arab turnout was predicted to reach 40 to 50 percent, compared with roughly 70 percent of Jewish voters.

A relatively high Arab turnout might nevertheless decide the election, since it could ensure that all three Arab-led parties enter Parliament, making it harder for former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to win a majority as he seeks to return to power.

But that may not necessarily help Yair Lapid, the centrist who has served as caretaker prime minister, build a new coalition himself. One of the three main Arab parties, Raam, is a member of Mr. Lapid’s bloc. But a second, Balad, sees Raam’s alliance with Mr. Lapid as an act of betrayal to Palestinians, and has won support by refusing to endorse any candidate for prime minister.

“We’re at a crossroads in Arab leadership, in which some leaders are normalizing Israel internally, from within,” said Sari Khalil, 25, a first-time Balad voter in Nazareth. “This is dangerous.”

But Raam still has its own supporters who feel that the party’s involvement in the departing government had a meaningful, if still small, effect on the lives of Palestinian citizens of Israel.

“We felt in the past year that there has been a change,” said Atiya al-Asam, an Arab leader in a deprived part of southern Israel that was allocated more funding by Mr. Lapid’s coalition. “There have been achievements by Raam that helped us,” he added.

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Once the ballots are in, what happens next?

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Israel’s Parliament during a vote to establish a new government last year. This time, members of 40 parties are competing for the legislature’s 120 seats.Credit...Dan Balilty for The New York Times

Israeli elections never result in a knockout win for a single party. Instead, they usually herald weeks, if not months, of coalition negotiations aimed at forming a government.

Once all of the ballots are counted, the first step is to determine which parties have secured at least 3.25 percent of the overall vote — the threshold required for parties to take up seats in Parliament. Forty parties are competing in Tuesday’s poll, and 13 fared well enough to enter Parliament in the last election, in 2021.

Then Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, will consult with representatives from all of the parties that have won seats to hear their nominations for prime minister.

The candidate who receives the most nominations, and is therefore deemed to have the best chance at succeeding, will be given a chance to form a government by negotiating with other parties to secure a majority of lawmakers.

That person has up to 28 days to carry out those negotiations and present a government. If needed, the president may also grant a 14-day extension.

If the candidate for prime minister is unable to form a government, the president can give another candidate a chance, or he can give Parliament 21 days to come up with someone from its ranks who is supported by a majority of lawmakers. That person would then have 14 days to try to form a government.

If no government is formed within the allotted time, the newly elected Parliament will automatically disperse, prompting yet another election.

Mr. Herzog’s predecessor, Reuven Rivlin, tried to break the political deadlock by proposing terms for a unity government after the March 2020 election, which had been the country’s third in a year. In a such an arrangement, parties from the two opposing political blocs would join forces to form a majority coalition.

Responding to reports in Israeli news media that Mr. Herzog might press for a unity government this time, his office said in a statement before Election Day: “The president does not intend to interfere in the elections and is uninvolved in the composition of the government, its size or the identity of the person who will lead it.”

An online disinformation effort ran rampant in recent days, a monitor group says.

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Supporters of the far-right, ultranationalist politician Itamar Ben-Gvir in Beit Shemesh, Israel, last month.Credit...Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times

Israeli officials and an online watchdog group said an unusually intense disinformation campaign took shape a few days before the election Tuesday. It involved hundreds of fake social media accounts and coordinated messages seemingly directed at discouraging turnout and causing general disruption and confusion by distributing antisemitic and anti-religious cartoons and messages.

According to an analysis by FakeReporter, an Israeli watchdog group that studies misinformation and disinformation, the operation bears characteristics similar to past social media campaigns that officials have identified as having Iranian origins. One Israeli official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss an active investigation, said that Israel’s Shin Bet security service had informed the Justice Ministry that it was investigating the new campaign as a potential Iranian effort to undermine the Israeli elections.

Those accusations could not be independently confirmed. But the chief executive of FakeReporter, Achiya Schatz, said the new campaign, which began on Twitter around Saturday, carried many of the hallmarks of past disinformation operations in which officials have accused Iran of involvement.

“We recognize in this network many characteristics that we found in Iranian disinformation influence campaigns we exposed in the past, such as using hash tags in a unique way, language mistakes typical of native Persian speakers, publishing certain antisemitic cartoons and more,” Mr. Schatz said.

The organization’s study said the campaign was carried out by a network of at least 300 false identities on Twitter, some of which used the details of real Israeli citizens, including some public and former officials, in order to appear more credible.

The tweets promoted several repetitive messages, among which were admonitions that voting would promote injustice, and claims discrediting Mr. Netanyahu and ultra-Orthodox parties. Many of the messages included antisemitic tropes and images, according to the analysis by FakeReporter, which is a Twitter-approved monitoring source.

The barrage of social media messages quickly gained attention in Israel, especially from political figures on the right — some of whom began blaming opposing political blocs of organizing the campaign. Some on the left blamed allies of Mr. Netanyahu for pushing the campaign.

That confusion, and the wave of public blame and excoriation that accompanied it, was most likely the point of the disinformation campaign, Mr. Schatz said.

“The very fact that the network’s activity is already causing mutual accusations shows how effective and dangerous it is,” Mr. Schatz said. “The network flooded the Israeli Twitter space and pushed vote-suppressing messages, with an aggressiveness never before seen on the Israeli feed. They publish content that is divisive, inflammatory and intended to harm the resilience and civil fabric of the target audience.”

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For Netanyahu, the campaigning doesn’t stop on Election Day.

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Benjamin Netanyahu speaking with the press after casting his vote at a polling station in Jerusalem on Tuesday.Credit...Amir Levy/Getty Images

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, has campaigned vigorously in his bid for a comeback.

He did not let up on Election Day.

Even before casting his ballot at a Jerusalem school-turned-polling station on Tuesday morning, Mr. Netanyahu, 73, made a surprise visit to a seemingly random apartment to wake up a snoozy voter named Oren, 18, who was fast asleep under his duvet.

“Do you want Lapid?” Mr. Netanyahu asked, alluding to his main rival, Prime Minister Yair Lapid, while urging the youth to get up and vote.

After voting, Mr. Netanyahu, who was ousted from office 16 months ago after a 12-year run, set out with his wife, Sara, for the largest shopping mall in Jerusalem, riding the escalators and urging people to go vote.

Some responded with cheers of “Hurray for Bibi!”

Prodding his supporters to come out and vote by asserting repeatedly that the turnout in leftist areas was higher than in areas that have traditionally voted for his conservative Likud party, Mr. Netanyahu then set out on a tour of Likud strongholds around the country.

“Whoever hasn’t voted, go vote!” Mr. Netanyahu told residents of Bat Yam. “We can bring a huge victory!”

Voters voice frustration, confusion — and hope for a clear outcome.

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Voting in Taibeh, Israel, on Tuesday.Credit...Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times

The Israeli electorate may be experienced after repeated elections and resolutely split between the camps supporting and opposed to Benjamin Netanyahu, the longest-serving Israeli prime minister, who was ousted last year. Yet by Election Day, many Israelis still appeared unsure about which of the array of 40 registered parties to vote for.

“I actually felt very, very confused this morning,” said Michal Kushar, 38, a youth counselor voting in Tzur Hadassah, a suburban community near Jerusalem. In the end, she said, she had voted for Ayelet Shaked, the leader of the right-wing Jewish Home party, even though the latest opinion polls suggested that it was unlikely to pass the threshold of 3.25 percent of the total vote that is required for any party to enter Parliament.

“I didn’t do it wholeheartedly, and I am not sure that is really what I wanted,” Ms. Kushar said. “I would love a woman to be prime minister, and I believe in Ayelet Shaked, but I do know it’s not going to happen.”

In such a closely fought election, where the gain or loss of one parliamentary seat can fundamentally sway the outcome, campaign strategists in both camps are concerned about votes being given to small parties that will not pass the threshold, as well as the uncertainties posed by undecided voters.

Some voters cast what they considered to be a “tactical” ballot to boost the bloc they support, going with their heads rather than their hearts.

Dr. Idan Yaron, 67, a sociologist and anthropologist who specializes in right-wing ideology and extremism in Israel, said he had voted for Meretz, a left-wing party hovering just above the electoral threshold, “to strengthen the smaller parties and the left bloc.”

Tomer Cohen, 46, a bus driver who supports the far-right, ultranationalist politician Itamar Ben-Gvir and his Jewish Power party, listed the country’s security and Jewish identity as his main considerations.

“I want a Jewish state and not a state of all its citizens,” he said, using a phrase that is a common refrain among many of Israel’s Arab politicians.

Hadeel Zatmi, 25, a voter in Nazareth, in the north, who is a Palestinian citizen of Israel, said she was so frustrated with the infighting among the Arab parties, among other things, that she had seriously considered boycotting the election. But in the end she said she had cast a ballot for the predominantly Arab, leftist Hadash-Ta’al slate, because “our existence in the Knesset is important,” referring to the Israeli Parliament.

Avi Algrabli, 37, a Netanyahu supporter in Jerusalem who runs a construction equipment company, said he still preferred the former prime minister to all of the others. Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing base has largely remained loyal, despite — or even because of — his corruption trial, which many of them view as a conspiracy cooked up by a liberal deep state.

Illustrating the deep polarization afflicting Israeli society, Mr. Algrabli said that Yair Lapid, the current prime minister and leader of the anti-Netanyahu bloc, “went with supporters of terrorism,” referring to the small Islamist party, Raam, that broke a historical taboo by joining the last governing coalition.

The voters turned out despite their election fatigue, mostly out of a sense of fulfilling their democratic right and duty.

“I’m very tired of elections,” said one centrist voter, Tehilah Puterman, 40. Pointing to her daughter, who was with her at the polling station, Ms. Puterman added, “This is her fourth election, and she is only 5.”

More than anything, some voters were hoping for an end to the political morass.

“I always hope that the person I vote for wins,” said Hanna Solodoch, 67, from Rehovot in central Israel. “But this does not always happen, and now it is also not my main concern.”

“The atmosphere in the country is full of incitement and instability, and this needs to end,” she said, adding, “We need a conclusive result.”

Reporting was contributed by Myra Noveck, Irit Pazner Garshowitz, Gabby Sobelman and Hiba Yazbek.

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For Yair Lapid, the caretaker prime minister, an unclear result would mean more time in office.

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Prime Minister Yair Lapid heading to greet activists and voters in Hod Hasharon, Israel, on Tuesday.Credit...Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times

For Yair Lapid, the prime minister of Israel’s caretaker government, the best outcome of Tuesday’s election may be no clear outcome at all.

If the ballot ends inconclusively, with neither side able to form a majority government, and if efforts to form a coalition fail, Israelis would probably head back to the polls in the spring and Mr. Lapid would get to stay on as leader of the interim government.

It worked for Benjamin Netanyahu, who stayed on as a caretaker prime minister for more than 16 months before and after two snap elections in 2019.

Mr. Lapid’s centrist party, Yesh Atid (which translates as “There Is a Future”), is the second largest after Mr. Netanyahu’s conservative Likud, according to pre-election polls, and Mr. Lapid is polling in second place behind the former leader.

But while Mr. Netanyahu helms a tight bloc of loyal right-wing and ultra-Orthodox parties, the anti-Netanyahu bloc comprises an ideologically disparate group of disaffected conservatives, liberals, leftists and Arab parties, some of whom refuse to sit in a coalition with others.

One Yesh Atid voter in Jerusalem, Tehilah Puterman, 40, said on Tuesday that she was backing the party because she was “afraid of the extremists getting in,” referring to Mr. Netanyahu’s far-right allies, and because she felt that Yesh Atid could be a unifying force.

Another Lapid voter, Dov Rozenberg, 41, of Tzur Hadassah, said that although he was politically and economically right-leaning, he was “not interested in Bibi being prime minister anymore,” referring to Mr. Netanyahu by his nickname. He was voting for Mr. Lapid, he said, even though Mr. Lapid, if victorious, would form the kind of coalition Mr. Rozenberg does not support.

Mr. Lapid, a former journalist and popular television host, founded Yesh Atid in 2012, and the party won 19 seats in the 120-seat Parliament the next year. He has served in government as minister of finance, of strategic affairs and of foreign affairs, and as an alternate prime minister, along with a stint as opposition leader.

After a March 2021 election in which Mr. Netanyahu was unable cobble together a majority, Mr. Lapid, the runner-up, formed a government by assembling a diverse coalition of eight parties with a razor-thin majority. In what many viewed as a selfless act, he allowed Naftali Bennett, a coalition partner who led a small, right-wing party, to take the first turn as prime minister in a rotation pact, because Mr. Bennett was seen as more acceptable to the coalition’s right flank.

That arrangement lasted a year. When the coalition imploded this June and Parliament was dissolved, Mr. Bennett handed over the reins to Mr. Lapid, honoring their prior agreement.

The powers of a caretaker government are limited, but in his short time in office Mr. Lapid has faced some high-stakes moments, including a three-day conflict with Islamic Jihad, the second largest militia in Gaza. His government also reached an American-mediated deal with Lebanon, a neighbor that technically remains at war with Israel, to resolve a decades-old dispute over their maritime border and facilitate the extraction of underwater gas reserves from the area.

Mr. Lapid ran a low-key and largely positive election campaign as the incumbent, presenting himself as the defender of liberal democracy and promising despondent voters that “there is a future for the state of Israel.”

Myra Noveck and Irit Pazner Garshowitz contributed reporting.

Why does Israel keep having so many elections?

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Voting during Israel’s parliamentary election at a polling station in Bnei Brak, Israel, on Tuesday.Credit...Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times

Israel keeps returning to the polls primarily because voters remain evenly split on the question of whether Benjamin Netanyahu, the longest-serving Israeli prime minister, is fit to run the country while standing trial on corruption charges.

Mr. Netanyahu was placed under investigation in 2016, on charges related to bribery, fraud and breach of trust. Ever since, the country has been divided between those who think he should now stay away from politics, and those who don’t.

Two elections in 2019 ended in a stalemate, leaving Mr. Netanyahu in power as a caretaker prime minister but unable to cobble together a formal coalition. A third election in 2020 resulted in a grand coalition between Mr. Netanyahu and Benny Gantz, a former army chief, but their alliance quickly collapsed before it even set a national budget, leading to a fourth election in March 2021.

That election also ended in deadlock, but Mr. Netanyahu was prized from office when a small right-wing party led by Naftali Bennett, who had been one of his allies, broke ranks and formed a coalition with Mr. Netanyahu’s opponents.

Despite some early successes, including setting Israel’s first budget in more than three years, Mr. Bennett controlled only a tiny majority and struggled to govern amid profound ideological differences among coalition members. The government collapsed in June of this year amid disagreements over the rights of Israel’s Arab minority, the relationship between religion and state, and settlement policy in the occupied West Bank.

Mr. Bennett ceded power to Yair Lapid, a centrist former broadcaster, and called for another early election — Israel’s fifth since April 2019.

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Turnout is the highest this century, but it isn’t clear who will benefit.

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Volunteers for the Balad party tallying voter turn out in Nazareth, Israel, on Tuesday.Credit...Amit Elkayam for The New York Times

Turnout in this election was at its highest this century as of Tuesday afternoon, with Israelis defying predictions of voter fatigue to participate in their fifth election in less than four years.

Early Wednesday, the central elections committee said that the final voter turnout by 10 p.m. Tuesday, when the polls closed, was 71.3 percent. That was the highest since Israel’s 2015 election, when turnout was 71.8 percent, but far below the mark set in 1999.

Pollsters said it was unclear what effect that would have on the final result, since there was no data about which parts of Israeli society were contributing most to the high turnout.

If the bump was caused by right-wing Israelis who stayed at home during the last election, that would help Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister who is seeking to return to office. But if members of Israel’s Arab minority voted in higher numbers than expected, that would make it harder for Mr. Netanyahu to come back to power.

“It’s complicated,” said Mitchell Barak, a pollster and political analyst. “I wouldn’t like to make a prediction.”

Still, it was clear that Israelis remained interested in electoral politics, despite the high number of elections since 2019, Mr. Barak said.

“It shows a certain resilience among Israelis,” Mr. Barak said. “We’re just going out again, we’re voting and the politicians won’t tire us out.”

‘Come here often?’: Campaigns try humor to overcome voter fatigue.

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Volunteers from the Otzma Yehudit party handed out fliers at the entrance to a polling station in Nof Hagalil, Israel, on Tuesday.Credit...Amit Elkayam for The New York Times

Israel’s national elections committee has tried humor to cajole people to come out to vote yet again.

“You know what to do,” one public service advertisement began, instead of trotting out the usual Election Day instructions. “Hey, you look so familiar. You must come here often?” a talking ballot box quipped in another. It even produced a “Save the Date” rap video for those who have so lost track of the seemingly endless campaign cycle that they had no idea when the vote was.

It’s all part of an effort urging voters not to succumb to election fatigue and give up their right to have a voice. And part of the motivation is that this election, like the previous four, is being closely fought, and for many parties the gain or loss of a single parliamentary seat could fundamentally affect the overall outcome.

For one thing, the latest polls indicated that several parties that helped make up the current governing coalition were hovering around or falling below the threshold to win seats in Parliament: 3.25 percent of the total vote.

T​here have also been concerns about a particularly low ​turnout among Arab voters this time, and any significant decrease is likely to shrink Arab representation in the next Parliament — probably to the benefit of Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing bloc. In the last election, in March 2021, voter turnout in Arab localities dropped to a low of 44.6 percent, compared with an overall turnout of 67.4 percent.

On Tuesday morning, the foreground of one Jerusalem polling station was uncharacteristically deserted an hour after it opened. There was none of the usual festive atmosphere — no party activists making last-minute pitches, no music, no balloons. One voter in the slow trickle of arrivals asked at the entrance whether it was even the right day to turn up.

One local resident, Amos Cafri, 74, a psychologist, who said he had voted for the left-wing Meretz party, said it was a “terrible feeling” having to come back for the fifth time in less than four years. “Of course I came to do the little I could do to help democracy in the country,” he said.

But with polls once again indicating gridlock — forming a government looks difficult for both the pro-Netanyahu and the anti-Netanyahu camp — some would-be voters expressed dismay and said they no longer trusted any of the parties.

“I probably won’t vote,” Asaf Eshel, 27, who works in a cafe in Jerusalem, said this past week. “There’s no point. It’s not relevant. There will probably be another election.”

Mr. Eshel said that he had been engaged in the last four elections, voting for different parties across the right-left spectrum. “But you pay an emotional price,” he said, noting that parties often ended up doing exactly what they had promised not to do. Now, he said, “I don’t believe any of them.”

Yet the voter-turnout efforts appeared to be working. By 8 p.m., turnout stood at 66.3 percent, according to Israel’s electoral commission — higher than at the equivalent stage of any Israeli election since 1999.

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Benny Gantz wants to be prime minister. He wouldn’t be the first leader of a small party to get the job.

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Benny Gantz maintains that only he can break the political impasse and form Israel’s next government.Credit...Dan Balilty for The New York Times

A murky outcome of Tuesday’s elections — with neither of the two main party leaders, Benjamin Netanyahu and Yair Lapid, emerging with a clear path to a majority government — could turn the spotlight on Benny Gantz, a potential kingmaker.

Typically, the leader of the largest party would head the new governing coalition, but the past several years have hardly been typical times in Israeli politics. And although his National Unity party was forecast to win only about a dozen of Parliament’s 120 seats, according to opinion polls released Friday, Mr. Gantz, a centrist former army chief, declared early in the campaign that he was running for prime minister.

There is some precedent for such a proposition: When the 2021 election wrought further deadlock, the resulting coalition talks led to Naftali Bennett’s installation as prime minister even though he was the leader of a small party that had won only seven seats.

This time, Mr. Gantz is campaigning as the head of the National Unity party, an alliance between his centrist Blue and White party and the more conservative — though anti-Netanyahu — New Hope party. He says that only he can break the political impasse and form the next government.

If Mr. Netanyahu again fails to win a majority, the argument goes, some of his longtime allies — namely the ultra-Orthodox parties — could abandon him and join forces with Mr. Gantz.

Mr. Gantz is more acceptable to those parties than Mr. Lapid, who has angered them in the past with efforts to end wholesale army exemptions for Torah students and curtail state funding for their institutions.

Political analysts say there is no clear indication that the ultra-Orthodox parties would abandon Mr. Netanyahu. But some speculate that if he and his camp won a majority, he would ultimately prefer to have Mr. Gantz’s party join his coalition in addition to — or even instead of — the far-right slate that makes up the pro-Netanyahu bloc, since broadening the coalition would help rebuff pressure for extreme policy changes from the far right.

Although Mr. Gantz has insisted that he will not sit in a government formed by Mr. Netanyahu, who is standing trial on corruption charges, not everyone is convinced. Mr. Gantz reneged on a similar pledge after a March 2020 election that ended inconclusively.

That time, Mr. Gantz justified his decision to join forces with Mr. Netanyahu on grounds that the country had to deal with the coronavirus pandemic and could not afford another round of elections.

Mr. Gantz was ultimately stung by Mr. Netanyahu, who prevented him from taking his turn as prime minister by refusing to pass a state budget, a move that set off an automatic dissolution of the Parliament and sent Israelis back to the ballot box.

Does Israel’s voting system contribute to political gridlock?

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Voters in Tel Aviv in March last year, during Israel’s fourth election since the beginning of 2019. They now face a fifth.Credit...Dan Balilty for The New York Times

Israel’s political paralysis has revived a long-running debate within the country about the dysfunction of its electoral process and whether it is time to change the system to reduce the power held by smaller factions.

Tuesday’s election is Israel’s 10th in the past two decades, more than in almost any other country during that time, leading some to question the effectiveness of the voting system.

There are no constituencies or voting districts, meaning that Israelis vote for parties rather than individual lawmakers. The parties, which select their lists of candidates, then win seats according to the proportion of the entire electorate that votes for the list. Any party that passes a threshold of 3.25 percent of the national vote can enter Parliament.

That makes it easier for smaller parties to establish a foothold, and harder for larger parties to form governments alone. Critics argue that the system, known as proportional representation, makes it too difficult to form stable governments because the small parties can exert influence disproportionate to their size.

The departing coalition government, for example, was cobbled together from eight parties and only narrowly eked out a parliamentary majority. When lawmakers from just one of those parties disagreed with a government plan, the alliance struggled to pass legislation, leading to frequent arguments and ultimately its premature collapse. Ultra-Orthodox parties, meanwhile, have historically leveraged their parliamentary power to exempt their community from the nationally required army service.

But supporters of the current system say that the problem is not in the voting mechanism itself.

Many countries that use forms of proportional representation have returned stable governments for decades. And constituency-based systems, like those in the United States, are not always a defense against political chaos or deadlock — as one voter in Israel pointed out on Tuesday morning.

In fact, many Israeli politicians and analysts argue that the country’s voting system could return a stable coalition if Benjamin Netanyahu, the current opposition leader, were not running. Most Israeli lawmakers are from right-wing parties and could easily form a large parliamentary majority in coalition with Mr. Netanyahu’s party, Likud, if he stood down as its leader.

The Israeli center left has often formed governments with Likud in the past, as has the current prime minister, Yair Lapid.

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