Israelis voted in large numbers on Tuesday, and initial exit polls indicated that a bloc of opposition parties held a lead over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right coalition in what many described as a make-or-break moment for the nation.
But Israel was far from knowing who its next leader will be.
The exit polls, published by Israel’s main television networks, indicated that Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing party, Likud, held a small lead over Yashar, the center-right political party led by Mr. Netanyahu’s main rival, Gadi Eisenkot.
The exit polls projected that two Arab parties would win as many as 17 or 18 seats in Parliament, which would be their strongest showing ever.
The actual process of counting and verifying votes will likely continue through Thursday. Depending on the results, assembling a governing coalition under Israel’s parliamentary system could take weeks or months.
With the horse trading about to begin to form a new government, both camps moved quickly to put their spin on the exit polls, which indicated that neither had won an outright majority of seats in Parliament.
Mr. Eisenkot declared that the numbers pointed to “a complete loss of confidence” in Mr. Netanyahu and his government. “If these are the final results, they would mark a victory,” he said.
Gideon Saar, a Likud member who serves as foreign minister, said, “The celebrations on the left are premature.” And Miki Zohar, the culture minister, went a step further, warning the opposition not to form a government that included Arab parties. “The public will not forgive nor forget” such an alliance, he said.
Voting in the election was extraordinarily brisk. Israeli election officials said that at least 77.7 percent of voters had cast ballots, the highest percentage since 1999. Hundreds of thousands of votes — including those of soldiers, prisoners and diplomats — had yet to be included in the count.
Turnout appeared to be particularly high, compared with previous elections, among Arab citizens, who make up about a fifth of Israel’s population. By late afternoon, turnout in some Arab-majority towns had exceeded the totals from the last election, in 2022. By contrast, turnout in the five towns where Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud party won its strongest support in 2022 was lagging.
Earlier in the day, Israel’s Central Elections Committee said it had rejected a request by the Likud party to extend voting hours past 10 p.m. The party made the request after Mr. Netanyahu urged his supporters to head to the polls by claiming that Israeli Arab citizens were “trying to steal the elections.”
Those comments, roundly condemned as racist, were the latest entry in Mr. Netanyahu’s long record of trying to motivate his political base by ringing alarms about Arab Israelis.
The Yashar party said it strongly opposed an extension of voting hours. It argued that the Likud was making the request to sow doubt about the election’s integrity.
The election was Israel’s first since the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, 2023, battered Mr. Netanyahu’s reputation as “Mr. Security” and ignited Israel’s devastating war in Gaza.
The contest pitted Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition, dominated by hard-line nationalists and ultra-Orthodox Jews, against a fractious group of opposition parties loosely led by Mr. Eisenkot, a former chief of staff in the Israeli military whose son was killed in the Gaza war.
Both sides framed the election as a potential turning point. Mr. Netanyahu suggested that Israel could face annihilation without him in charge, a message he reinforced by posting an A.I.-generated image on social media this week of a mushroom cloud exploding over Tel Aviv.
As Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, he has a deep well of support among conservative Israelis who regard him as an indispensable defender of the Jewish State.
“Bibi flows in my blood,” Shoshi Ashtbeker, 47, a school secretary from Tel Aviv, said on Tuesday, referring to Mr. Netanyahu by his nickname, after she cast her vote for him. “No one can replace Bibi. He’s strong — a world leader.”
Others said they were ready for a change.
“Netanyahu did a lot of big things, but I think he’s done his job,” said Ayelet Veprinskiy, 25, a student in Jerusalem. She voted for the party led by Naftali Bennett, a former prime minister. “He’s had 20 years in this chair. He can go now.”
Mr. Netanyahu’s opponents cast the election as the last chance to preserve Israeli democracy and to pull the country back from the brink of becoming a pariah state under international sanctions.
Mr. Eisenkot accused Mr. Netanyahu of embroiling Israel in intractable wars, destroying its international standing and dodging responsibility for security failures that preceded the Oct. 7 attacks. He promised to create a national commission to investigate the security failures that led to those attacks.
Mr. Eisenkot also vowed to enforce mandatory military service for ultra-Orthodox Jewish men, a major flashpoint in Israel as the country mobilized thousands of reservists for the war in Gaza.
Mr. Eisenkot has criticized Mr. Netanyahu’s prosecution of the war, but has said he is prepared to carry out more attacks in Gaza, if necessary. He has also promised to curb settler attacks on Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, an issue that Mr. Netanyahu has played down.
But Mr. Eisenkot, like Mr. Netanyahu, has said he opposes Palestinian statehood.
Pollsters had expected Israel’s Arab voters to turn out in force to oppose Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition, and the exit polls suggested that many Arab voters were highly motivated.
“Overall, the feeling is very good,” said Fidaa Shehadeh, 42, an Arab Israeli voter in Lod, a city southeast of Tel Aviv, who cast her vote for an Arab party. “We’re seeing people getting involved. I expect that we can change the current government, because this government has been one of the worst for our community.”
Though Israeli Arabs have the same right to vote as all other Israelis, many have long felt that they are treated as second-class citizens. And Mr. Netanyahu cast their high turnout in the direst terms in a last-minute bid to get his supporters to the polls.
“There are buses heading to the polls and long lines in Arab towns,” he said on social media. “Meanwhile, right-wing strongholds have yet to wake up! If we don’t go vote now, we will find ourselves with a government of Arab parties.”
Israeli Arab political leaders accused Mr. Netanyahu of racist fearmongering. Yousef Jabareen, who leads an alliance of Arab parties, said the prime minister was “inciting against Arab citizens and undermining the legitimacy of our vote.”
“I’m telling you: the Arab community knows how to punish you,” Mr. Jabareen said on social media. “Today we’re sending you and your bloodstained government packing.”
The Likud party and some far-right ministers in Mr. Netanyahu’s government also deployed incendiary messages about high Arab voter turnout.
In a video recorded near the entrance of an Arab-majority town in central Israel, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister, said that Arab voters were heading to the polls “at never-before-seen rates,” threatening Israel’s Jewish character.
The comments were not out of keeping for Mr. Netanyahu and his allies. On Election Day in 2015, Mr. Netanyahu declared that Arab voters were “being bused to the polling stations in droves” by left-wing organizations. He later apologized for the comments after they prompted criticism in Israel and abroad, including from the Obama administration.
Reporting was contributed by Lia Lapidot, Johnatan Reiss and Heedo Abu Laban.
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