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Israeli Channel 12 reported on Wednesday that the ultra-Orthodox "Shas" party does not rule out cooperating with "Yashar" party leader Gadi Eisenkot and joining a government led by him later, should he succeed in forming one.
The channel quoted an unnamed Shas official as saying: "If Eisenkot is smart, he will form a government and not occupy the positions important to us, and if there is a reasonable conscription law, we might join later."
The statement comes at a time when updates to exit poll samples showed a tie between the camps of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Eisenkot, with 51 seats each, compared to 18 seats for the Arab parties.
According to an update from the Israeli Broadcasting Corporation's sample, the Likud party led by Netanyahu took the lead with 27 seats, followed by "Yashar" led by Eisenkot with 21, then the "Ma'an" party led by Naftali Bennett with 13 seats, and the Joint List with 11.
The "Democrats" party also received 9 seats, "Yisrael Beiteinu" 8, and the United Arab List 7, while the Shas, United Torah Judaism, Otzma Yehudit, and Religious Zionism parties each received 6 seats.
With these figures, neither the Netanyahu nor the Eisenkot camp possesses the necessary majority to form a government, which is 61 seats out of 120 in the Knesset.
On Tuesday evening, the Israeli Election Committee announced that the voter turnout reached 77.7 percent, an increase of 7.1 percent over the 2022 elections, the highest since 1999.
Exit poll samples do not represent the official election results, while the vote-counting process continues.
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