Israel's third elections in the span of 11 months drew to a close Monday night, with exit polls giving Likud a solid lead over Blue and White: 37 vs. 33, Channel 12 News' exit poll show. The channel later updated the results, giving Likud 37 and Blue and White 32.
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Despite the strong showing, the Likud and its allies are still one MK short of one seat to get a majority in the Knesset. Gantz appeared early Tuesday morning and told party supporters "that the country needs unity," but refused to concede.
"We have only just started fighting," he said, adding that results were similar to those in the April 2019 election. He then hinted that he would likely seek some sort of power-sharing deal with Netanyahu, perhaps through a rotating premiership.
Following Gantz's speech, Netanyahu arrived at Expo Tel Aviv to address his supporters, who greeted him with several minutes of applause and cheers, owing to his successful bid to make Likud the largest party: It is poised to become, once all votes are counted, the biggest it has been in more than a decade.
"What a great happy night this is," Netanyahu told the ecstatic crowd. "This is a night of a great victory! Thank you so much to all of you!"
The exit poll's overall Knesset distribution gave the right-haredim bloc 60 seats and the center-left bloc 54 seats, and this was later updated to 59 and 54.
Yisrael Beytenu, which defines itself as right-wing but has refused to sit with Netanyahu in a government, got six seats during the initial projections, and later this figure was revised to 7. Thus, it remains the wildcard because it can theoretically side with the Left and help it create a minority government.
The Joint Arab List retained its power as the third-largest faction in parliament, winning 15 seats in the revised exit poll data, followed by Shas, which got 9. The hawkish Yamina party and the left-wing alliance of Meretz-Gesher-Meretz got 7 seats each, as did the ultra-Orthodox Ashkenazi alliance United Torah Judaism.
The far-right Otzma Yehudit party failed to pass the prerequisite four-Knesset-seat electoral threshold of 3.25% of the votes.
Israel's unprecedented third vote began at 7 a.m. Monday, as 10,840 polling stations nationwide, staffed by some 100,000 election workers, opened their doors. Over 6.45 million Israelis were eligible to vote in March's general elections.
Turnout was 71%, the highest since the 1999 elections.
