Who won?
With 97% of votes counted, the prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party and Benny Gantz’s Blue and White party are tied on seats won.
So who won?
Netanyahu has won, after Gantz conceded on Wednesday afternoon. Along with a grouping of nationalist, religious and far-right parties, the incumbent leader always had the clearest path to forming a coalition government out of the 120-seat Knesset.
When will we know the full result?
An official tally may not come in until Friday.
What happens now?
Israel’s political system is based on delicately formed and unstable coalitions crafted by a majority in the Knesset. No party has won a majority since Israel’s first election in 1949.
As such Netanyahu has already begun to broker deals with religious and far-right parties to form Israel’s next government.
Once a final tally is released, Israel’s president, Reuven Rivlin, will hold consultations with political parties, and under Israeli election law he will ask them to recommend a prime minister before tasking the winning candidate with forming a coalition government.
How long will that take?
Once the president tasks a candidate with creating a government, they have 42 days to do so. And in 2015, it took Netanyahu more than a month to play the political game and gather enough seats.
If a candidate fails to form a government, the president asks another politician to try. This year, Netanyahu already has unofficial support from some parties.
What happens after that?
Once Netanyahu has secured a coalition he will be set to become Israel’s longest-serving leader. But he also faces three separate corruption cases in which the attorney general has announced his intention to indict, a process that could start in the next few weeks.
