Israel's Central Elections Committee formally certified the results of the October 27 parliamentary election on Wednesday, rejecting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's week-long campaign to brand the vote stolen. President Isaac Herzog accepted the certified tally as legally binding, clearing the way for consultations on who gets first crack at forming a government.

The committee said a review of all 9,069 polling stations turned up no irregularities that compromised the vote's integrity or changed its outcome. The five-member presidium split along political lines: Yesh Atid and Blue and White voted to ratify, Likud and Shas abstained, and committee chair Justice Noam Sohlberg cast the deciding vote. A Likud member of the committee, Amit Halevi, resigned in protest, alleging without evidence that rival lawmakers "bought their seats with bribe money," while National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir declared the election "stolen" and had his Otzma Yehudit party vote against approval.

The fight over legitimacy comes down to math: Netanyahu's bloc took 53 seats, Gadi Eisenkot's opposition bloc 48, and Arab-led parties Ra'am and the Joint List a record combined 19 — leaving neither side near the 61 needed to govern. Israel's Shin Bet security service told the committee that intelligence pointed to foreign funding and influence operations involving "thousands of people and possibly more," but law enforcement officials said they had no evidence of an operation anywhere near that scale. Qatar, which Likud figures have implicated, dismissed the claims as "disinformation."

What happens next

Herzog will spend two days consulting bloc leaders before naming a candidate to try to build a coalition, meeting smaller factions first — Religious Zionism, Shas and Yisrael Beytenu — before turning Thursday to Eisenkot's Yashar party and, last, Likud. Whoever is tapped gets 28 days to assemble a government, with a possible 14-day extension; if that fails, Israel heads to another election early next year. It took Netanyahu 58 days to stitch together a coalition after the 2022 vote, and this parliament is even more fractured.

"There is one thing on which we must agree: election results, as lawfully determined, are binding on us all," said committee chair Justice Noam Sohlberg, warning that casting doubt on the results poses "a real danger" to Israeli democracy.

Herzog, for his part, struck a conciliatory note as he accepted the results, saying both sides must recognize that "not every commitment and promise can be fulfilled" and calling for "originality and creativity, courage and goodwill" in the coalition talks ahead. With the certification now final, the fight shifts from the ballot count to the horse-trading needed to actually govern — and Netanyahu's camp has given no sign it plans to let the fraud narrative die quietly.