Israel’s polls now disagree about everything except the deadlock
Channel 12 has Eisenkot’s Yashar four seats clear of Likud; Channel 13 has them tied. The Jerusalem Post’s average puts both blocs on 52, with twelve Arab-party seats outside the arithmetic.
Israelis vote on Tuesday 27 October for all 120 Knesset seats, with 61 needed for a majority; the slates are closed, per the Library of Congress law library’s 10 October explainer and the Israel Policy Forum’s candidate tracker. The Jerusalem Post’s round-up, published 11 October at 08:42 UTC and drawing on Maariv, Channel 13 and KAN, found Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar ahead in all three surveys — but by amounts that do not agree. Channel 12 put Yashar on 23 and Netanyahu’s Likud on 21; Channel 13 had both on 20, with Eisenkot down one and Netanyahu up one week-on-week, and the blocs at 55 for Netanyahu against 50 for the opposition. Inside the Netanyahu camp, Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit slipped a seat and Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism gained one.
The trendline is a wobble, not a direction. Channel 13 on 8 October had the same 55–50 split, with Likud and Yashar level on 20, Otzma Yehudit 8, UTJ 8, Shas 7, Religious Zionism-Zehut 7 and Ofer Winter’s People of Israel on 5. Channel 12 on 5–6 October had the opposite bloc result, Eisenkot 54 to Netanyahu 49, with Winter below the threshold — where Channel 12 again placed him on 11 October. In mid-September, after lists closed, i24NEWS/Direct Polls was the outlier at Likud 27 and Yashar 22, while Kan had Yashar 25 to Likud 21 and Channel 13 found a 53–53 tie. The Post’s own polling average on 11 October: roughly 52 apiece. No snippet we obtained carried a sample size, so no margin of error can honestly be quoted against these numbers.
The one stable figure is the one neither bloc counts. The Arab parties hold 12 seats across the surveys, unchanged, and are affiliated with neither camp. At 52 and 52, that is not a rounding error — it is the difference between a government and a fourth election.
Assessment: A four-seat gap in one network poll and a dead heat in another, published the same day, is a measurement problem as much as a political one; readers should watch the bloc totals and ignore the party-by-party seat churn, which is inside whatever the unstated noise is. The more useful question is what the Gulf escalation does to this. Netanyahu’s campaign rests on a claim of having dismantled Iran’s missile capability; a war that reopens in Riyadh rather than Tel Aviv gives him the atmosphere of crisis without the demonstration of his own result. And the twelve Arab-party seats remain the unexamined variable in every forecast that treats 61 as reachable.