Israel votes on Tuesday with neither bloc near a majority, and Arab parties holding the balance

About 7.3 million Israelis are eligible to vote on Tuesday in an election that has become a referendum on the longest serving prime minister in the country's history, and the final polls say nobody wins it outright.

The last surveys published before the legal blackout put Eisenkot's Yashar party first among the parties, at 22 to 23 seats in the television polls, with Netanyahu's Likud at 19 to 21. Added up by camp, the opposition runs at about 52 to 56 seats and Netanyahu's bloc at about 48 to 50, as of October 23. The Knesset has 120 seats and a government needs 61. One outlier poll, from Channel 14, gave Netanyahu's bloc 62 seats and a majority, and it is the only one of the major surveys that did.

That arithmetic puts the Arab parties in the middle of an election both camps would rather fight without them. The Joint List and Mansour Abbas's Ra'am are projected to take at least 13 seats combined. Arab citizens are about 20 percent of Israel's population, hold full citizenship, and are expected to turn out in high numbers. Abbas has spent the final days urging his community to vote, arguing that Arab turnout can decide whether a new government replaces the present one. "We can ensure the formation of a new government of change," he said.

The opposition has promised not to use those seats. Eisenkot and the other leaders of his camp have said they will not form alliances with the Arab parties, and Eisenkot put it in his own terms. "I do not see an Arab party that accepts my principles," he said, pointing among other things to their refusal to call Hamas a terrorist organisation. If both blocs keep that promise and both fall short, Israel faces weeks of coalition bargaining with no clean outcome, or another election.

The last week of the campaign ran through the West Bank. Two Israeli soldiers were killed at a checkpoint near Hebron on Friday, Netanyahu ordered a full closure of the territory through election day, and the army operation in Hebron has displaced 2,670 people by the Palestinian Authority's count, as of October 26. President Trump has given Netanyahu his complete and total endorsement in writing. Netanyahu closed his campaign warning that Iran's nuclear programme threatens a second Holocaust. Israelis vote on Tuesday with the wars in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran, the failures of October 7 and Netanyahu's corruption trial all on the ballot at once.