President Donald Trump said Wednesday that his endorsement of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boosted the Israeli leader’s showing in this week’s election, as partial results put Netanyahu’s bloc ahead of its rivals but short of the 61 seats needed to govern.
“I think when the endorsement went out, it had helped him a lot,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One. No independent polling in the material reviewed by The Eastern Updates measures the endorsement’s effect, so the claim stands as Trump’s own assessment.
Netanyahu’s seat total has slipped as ballots come in. With about 42 percent of the vote counted early Wednesday, his bloc was projected at 57 seats to the opposition’s 47. At the half-way mark the figures were 56 to 49, with Arab parties at 15. By two-thirds counted, the tally was 56 to 48 with Arab parties at 16. The latest Central Elections Committee figures, with about 72 percent of ballot boxes counted as of 10:03 a.m. in Israel, give Netanyahu’s bloc 54 seats, former military chief Gadi Eisenkot’s bloc 48 and Arab-led parties 18. Earlier tallies at 60 percent counted had Likud as the largest party with 28 seats and Eisenkot’s Yashar party second. Partial results are likely to change.
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Tuesday night’s exit polls had not settled the matter either. The three main Israeli broadcasters first gave Eisenkot’s bloc a two-seat edge, 52 to 50. Updated projections moved toward Netanyahu, showing him tied at 51 seats or slightly ahead of Eisenkot’s 49. Channel 14, which is strongly pro-Netanyahu, projected 60 seats for him against 43 for Eisenkot. Turnout was the highest in more than two decades, according to NPR.
Both sides are already claiming the result. Netanyahu said his right-wing bloc won a decisive majority among the Zionist public, a framing that excludes the Arab parties, and that he plans to form a right-wing government. Eisenkot said Israelis had voted for change and urged Netanyahu to accept defeat. Yair Golan, who chairs The Democrats, said Wednesday that “Netanyahu lost” and called on the opposition to build a government with the support of Arab parties.
The endorsement itself came late. Trump gave Netanyahu a full endorsement in a Truth Social post on Sunday, October 18, nine days before the vote, after withholding it for months and saying only days earlier that he had not thought about backing a candidate. The reversal followed reported disagreements between the two governments over Washington’s efforts to end the war with Iran. Trump told the Axios news site he had begun planning the endorsement earlier that week.
Netanyahu moved quickly to use it. He released video of a phone call in which Trump predicted a Netanyahu victory and suggested the two leaders could again act together against Iran. “Donald, we have a job to finish,” Netanyahu said in the clip. Eisenkot, his main challenger, said he respected Trump but argued that only Israelis can choose their leader.
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Analysts disagreed about how much weight a foreign endorsement carries with Israeli voters. Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to Washington, said in August that a formal endorsement mattered less once it had itself become a political issue. In the same call, Trump told Netanyahu he had been treated unfairly by his own country and by some others, and called him a warrior.
Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, whose party joined Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid in April to form the Together alliance, told supporters on election night that Netanyahu had lost. Exit polls gave Together 12 to 13 seats, against a pre-election polling average of 13.6. The Arab-led Joint List stood at 12 seats in the count at 60 percent, with the Arab parties combined at 16 at that stage and 18 in the latest tally.
Netanyahu is campaigning while subject to an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. He has angrily denounced the charges, and the Trump administration has sought to weaken the court in The Hague through sanctions.
Last polls before the vote gave Netanyahu’s outgoing coalition an average of 50.2 seats, against the 61 it needed. Eisenkot’s Yashar was averaging 22.1 seats and finishing first in eight of nine polls. Israelis voted Tuesday in their first general election since the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023.
