Israel’s election rhetoric: What candidates said, and how they performed

Israel’s parliamentary election produced no clear winner: with nearly 90 percent of ballots counted, Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc was on course for 53 seats and Gadi Eisenkot’s opposition bloc for 48, short of the 61 needed to form a government. Arab-majority parties won a record 19 seats, after turnout among Palestinian citizens of Israel reached about 80 percent, putting them at the centre of coalition negotiations even as several party leaders ruled out governing with them. During the campaign, Netanyahu expressed confidence and warned that the opposition could grant citizenship to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. On election day, he called forming a government with Arab-led parties “a shame and a disgrace.”