Herzog holds 67 recommendations for Eisenkot and will sit on them until Sunday

President Isaac Herzog finished consulting the factions of the 26th Knesset on Thursday 5 November and said he would assign the mandate on Sunday 8 November. Factions totalling 67 MKs recommended Yashar leader Gadi Eisenkot; factions totalling 46 recommended Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, leaving seven of the 120 seats unassigned in the published tallies. The Jerusalem Post’s arithmetic behind the 67 is Eisenkot’s opposition bloc at 48 plus the Arab parties at 19; the Central Elections Committee’s final count gave the Netanyahu bloc 53. Likud took 20.52 per cent and 27 seats, down nine; Yashar, a new party, took 913,502 votes, 16.05 per cent and 21 seats; Naftali Bennett’s Together took 9.34 per cent and 12. Final CEC tabulation put turnout at 77.97 per cent, up 7.34 points on 2022, with 5,716,673 ballots cast of 7,331,981 eligible. Earlier provisional figures of 77.7 and 77.9 per cent circulated widely and are the same count at different stages.

Herzog, in remarks from the President’s Residence carried by Al Jazeera, said that in a reality “in which there is no clear winner after the elections” he was asking party leaders for “originality and creativity, courage and goodwill”, and that not “every commitment and promise can be fulfilled”. He is declining to act on a majority recommendation for three days because the 67 is not a coalition: it includes 19 MKs from the two Arab-majority lists, and Haaretz’s Michael Hauser Tov reported on 5 November that parts of Eisenkot’s own bloc are wary of accepting their endorsement. Mansour Abbas’s United Arab List recommended Eisenkot first; the Joint List followed despite internal reluctance. The Jerusalem Post lists the live outcomes as an Eisenkot government, a Netanyahu–Eisenkot unity government, or a minority government.

Running underneath the consultations is a fight over whether the result stands. Haaretz reported on 3 November that Likud was weighing refusing to recognise the election results, and that the Shin Bet chief was withholding alleged election-interference material from the police; both claims appeared in a single Haaretz live blog and neither was corroborated elsewhere in this sweep. On 4 November the Central Elections Committee certified the results after finding no evidence of fraud. On 5 November, Haaretz reported that Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit pushed the stolen-election narrative inside its formal consultation with the president, where Herzog pushed back; the endorsement of Netanyahu is on the record, the characterisation of the exchange is Haaretz’s. Netanyahu’s first public appearance since the vote, on 4 November, was reported as a warning against an Arab–Jewish coalition.

Assessment: The three-day pause is the story. A president with 67 recommendations in hand who waits is not deliberating over arithmetic; he is pricing a unity government while both blocs still think they have options. Read the Israeli mastheads against each other rather than for facts: Haaretz calls the Arab lists kingmakers and leads on Likud’s flirtation with non-recognition, Arutz Sheva simply counts to 67. Two cautions. The seven unassigned seats have not been explained in any outlet we could read. And the Shin Bet interference claim rests on one partisan masthead; if it holds, it outranks everything else on this desk.