New Delhi, Oct. 28 -- The Israeli electorate seems to have firmly rejected Binyamin Netanyahu and his hard-right coalition. Exit polls on October 27th suggest that the prime minister's Likud party has lost around a quarter of the 32 seats it won in the 2022 election and that his coalition will fall short of a majority in the Knesset, Israel's 120-seat parliament, by at least ten seats. Yet Mr Netanyahu, who has been in office for a total of 19 years and hoped to form an unprecedented seventh government, does not appear ready to accept defeat.

The Economist's average of exit polls give the opposition parties 70 seats in the next Knesset, with 50 for the Netanyahu bloc. Yashar, a newish centre-right party led by Gadi Eisenkot, a former gen...