Demographics

Record-breaking voter turnout in Palestinian-Israeli communities around 80 percent, early indications show.

Israel’s Arab parties are projected to win 18 seats in the Israeli parliament, exit polls indicate, after voting among Palestinian citizens of Israel surged to their highest levels in decades.

Exit polling data from Tuesday’s vote suggested that the leading Arab-led parties, the Joint List and Ra’am, are set to hold a record number of seats in the 120-member Knesset. Updated exit polling indicated that the opposition bloc led by former Israeli military chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar party and the bloc led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party were tied at 51 seats each.

Early indications put voter turnout among Palestinian citizens of Israel at around 80 percent, historic numbers that break 1999 records, Israel’s Channel 12 reported on Tuesday.

The leader of Ra’am, or the United Arab List, Mansour Abbas, said he hopes the final election results will allow the anti-Netanyahu bloc, including his party, to win the 61 seats required to form a government.

“With the numbers we have now, there is no government,” Abbas told Israel’s Channel 12.

Abbas, whose Ra’am party currently holds five seats in the Knesset and joined the coalition that governed Israel from 2021 to 2022, added that both main blocs reached out to his party before and after the election.

‘Arabs can’t be kept outside’

Speaking to Al Jazeera, Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli ambassador, said creating a government might prove difficult for parties such as Eisenkot’s – which earlier exit polls had put narrowly ahead – because they promised not to form coalitions with Arab parties during the campaign.

“There’s a price to pay,” Pinkas said, because the “Arabs can’t be kept outside and only being considered and co-opted when you need their votes”.

He added that the Arab-led lists will make demands that a Jewish-led coalition government may not support.

Netanyahu and his far-right coalition made last-ditch efforts on Tuesday to get their supporters to the polls, warning of surging voter turnout among Palestinian citizens of Israel, a tactic Arab politicians denounced as racist and inflammatory.

Cars flying Netanyahu’s Likud party flags drove through Jerusalem blaring the Islamic call to prayer and urging supporters to cast their ballots because “Arabs are voting”, witnesses said.

In social media posts, the embattled prime minister highlighted long queues at polling stations in Arab communities and published an image that he said showed Arab voters, including women wearing the niqab, a veil that covers the lower half of the face, waiting to vote.

“If we don’t wake up now, we’ll find ourselves with a government of Mansour Abbas and Ahmad Tibi,” he said, referring to two leading Palestinian members of the Knesset.

Overall voter turnout was also historic, reaching its highest level since 1999 with 77.7 percent casting ballots in Tuesday’s election, the Central Elections Committee reported. Palestinian citizens of Israel make up about 21 percent of the country’s population of 10 million and have traditionally voted at lower rates than Jewish Israelis.

‘Existential moment’

Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh, reporting from Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, called the election “an existential moment for Palestinian-Israelis”.

She noted the record turnout among what has emerged as a key voting bloc, which drew “even [voters] who would usually boycott elections, who didn’t believe it would amount to any kind of influence, that it would change their reality, that it would alter the systemic discrimination that they face”.

The Knesset has passed more than 100 laws discriminating against Palestinian citizens of Israel, who also face discrimination in receiving state funds, Odeh said.

With more than one million votes counted, about 76 percent supported remaining in Canada.

Alberta residents have voted to remain ⁠part of Canada in the province’s first-ever referendum on separation, in a much-needed win for Prime Minister Mark Carney as he ‌attempts to unify the country amid an ongoing trade war with the United States.

With more than one million votes counted, about 77 percent supported remaining in Canada, compared with 23 percent who backed beginning a process that could lead to separation, early results showed on Tuesday.

The vote was not a direct referendum on independence but would have set oil-rich Alberta on a path towards a future vote on separation from Canada.

Carney welcomed the result and said Albertans had made a “clear choice” in favour of unity.

“They chose unity, to build together, and to take care of each other,” he said in a statement on X.

Jeffrey Rath, a top leader of the secessionist Alberta Prosperity Project, told reporters his push for an independent Alberta will “absolutely” continue, despite the result from Monday’s vote.

“We’ve learned a lot of lessons from this fight,” he said.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, a conservative, said she voted against independence but called the referendum to settle an issue that has divided the province.

She has said a win for the federalists would close the secession question.

Alberta has the world’s fourth-largest proven oil reserves, and much of the secessionist momentum has been driven by anger over oil industry management.

Smith has blamed Carney’s predecessor Justin Trudeau for igniting the secessionist fire, accusing him of trying to crush oil production to advance his pro-climate agenda.

Alberta’s independence push has also drawn sustained interest from the allies of US President Donald Trump, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who called Alberta Washington’s “natural partner”. Elon Musk, the world’s richest person and eminent Trump supporter, also posted on X that Alberta “should separate”.

Carney, who grew up in Alberta, has worked to improve relations between the province and Ottawa since taking office last year. He has partnered with Smith on advancing a new pipeline to export more Alberta bitumen overseas, a project considered a nonstarter during Trudeau’s tenure.