SIHANOUKVILLE, Cambodia — A U.S. cruise ship on an around-the-world voyage that touted its cabins as floating homes suspended its three-year journey in Cambodia due to fuel costs, forcing hundreds of passengers to disembark.
The MV Odyssey set sail two years ago on a voyage to the seven continents marketed as combining long-term living at sea with global travel. Its operator had offered to “make the Odyssey your permanent home,” with the purchase price of a suite for the lifetime of the vessel starting around $230,000.
For now, it is docked at the Cambodian port of Sihanoukville on the Gulf of Thailand, with no certain departure date.
The ship has been carrying 203 passengers, mostly Americans, along with 156 crew members, according to Cambodian officials. It has a 650-passenger capacity.
Its Florida-based operator, Villa Vie Residences, said monthly fuel expenses per cabin that historically averaged $1,800 have reached an estimated $6,000 to $8,000 in parts of Asia due to the war in Iran. The company said it sought to reduce fuel consumption by slowing the itinerary and spending more time in port, but was unable to offset the surging costs.
Traffic has been curtailed in the Strait of Hormuz since the war in Iran began, squeezing supplies of all kinds of petroleum-based fuels, especially in Southeast Asia, and sharply increasing prices.
“We have been unable to continue carrying the resulting operating losses,” Villa Vie Residences said in a statement issued Tuesday. “Passing the full increase on to residents is not a realistic solution. Our focus now is on supporting residents, crew, and employees” while it tries to restructure.
“The company is working with residents to coordinate disembarkation and identify temporary living arrangements,” it said.
Those on the ship had hoped to sail for years to come
Passengers, however, said they received no support and had to make their own arrangements after being given seven hours notice on Tuesday to disembark. Some were devastated and expressed hope a new company could rescue the venture so life at sea can continue.
Paul and Lynn Montoya, a retired couple from Wyoming, said they bought a window cabin and had expected to sail for years. They boarded the ship 17 months ago in Panama.
Paul praised the concept of residential cruising but said the shipowner lacked the expertise to make the business financially sustainable. While rising fuel costs had been cited publicly as the reason for the suspension, he said the company had already been struggling. Changes to itinerary, unreliable internet access and declining food quality had pushed many residents to leave the ship in recent months, he said.
Lynn said residents were repeatedly asked to contribute additional money for fuel and other expenses, including a fresh call to raise funds for fuel to get out of Cambodia. She said the crew members were also not paid.
“We were tired of every two to four weeks being asked for money for fuel, money for everything,” she said. “We had hopes but they just kept sinking further and further into the hole through mismanagement.”
The company could not immediately be contacted for comment.
For some, the venture was a risk worth taking
Yet for some, even the financial and logistical turmoil couldn’t outweigh the extraordinary experience of traveling the world and living at sea.
Carol Larson, 69, and her sister Crystal Lavering, 72, occupied separate cabins aboard the ship for 18 months. The siblings, from California, described the suspension as heartbreaking, and hoped the cruise would be resuscitated.
“I hope there is a movement for the residents to buy the ship and I am hoping that goes through because it’s a dream to live on the ship and I don’t want it to end,” Larson said.
Lavering said her health improved during her time on the ship, and that she didn’t need to use a cane to walk anymore. “You come to this ship to live … it’s just sad that it’s all over.”
Larson bought her cabin for $120,000, paid in installments, in addition to monthly maintenance fees, under a plan that had promised the possibility of living aboard for up to 15 years. She said she blamed U.S. President Donald Trump for the ship’s woes as fuel costs spiked due to the Iran war, in addition to poor management. But she said she didn’t regret her investment.
“Because it was a startup company, I believe that it was a risk. From the very first day, I said to myself that if it lasts a year, I can walk away and feel like I got my money’s worth … I still feel that way. I feel blessed to have been part of the experiment of residential cruising,” she said.
The cruise began in Northern Ireland in 2024
The ship arrived in Sihanoukville last Friday and was scheduled to depart Wednesday, according to a statement from Long Dimanche, the deputy governor of Preah Sihanouk province. He said it was now expected to refuel and depart Cambodia on Saturday, but the ship’s operator has not yet publicly confirmed any date.
Built in 1993 and operated under different names by several cruise lines over the years before being becalmed by the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, the Odyssey was bought by Villa Vie Residences in 2023.
Its current cruise, originally intended to last 3 1/2 years, began in October 2024 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where the ship had been refitted. A second cruise had been tentatively scheduled to end in August 2030.
The Odyssey is not the first cruise ship Sihanoukville has hosted in crisis.
In February 2020, the MS Westerdam was allowed to dock in Cambodia after being turned away at five ports in other nations because of fears of COVID-19, which just a month earlier had started to spread from China. It carried 1,455 passengers, more than 600 of them American citizens.
After being stranded at sea for two weeks, Cambodia’s then-Prime Minister Hun Sen allowed it to dock for what he said were humanitarian reasons. Cambodia won plaudits as passengers were welcomed ashore and arrangements were made for them to fly home.

Dolores Huerta, the fiery and resolute activist who helped launch and guide the nation’s first enduring labor union for poor farmworkers and later became an inspiration to women and liberal true believers, has died. She was 96.
Erik Olvera, a family spokesperson, told The Times that Huerta died in Bakersfield on Wednesday, surrounded by members of her “huge family.” The cause, he said, was cancer.
“It’s a tough time,” Olvera said. “She was incredibly beloved, and not only was she beloved, but she was an icon to so many people around the country and around the world, really. If anything, her family is clinging to memories and clinging to each other as they mourn.”
Huerta never gave up on her dream of a more equitable distribution of wealth in America, campaigning for working people for years beyond standard retirement age.
The emotional compass of the United Farm Workers of America for decades, the petite mother of 14 attained singular stature as a rule-breaking proto-feminist, godmother of the Chicano power movement and doyenne of American labor.
Huerta’s fervent crusading for the dispossessed made her the potent alter ego to her union co-founder, the soft-spoken and methodical Cesar Chávez, though the full complexity and pathology of their relationship only became publicly apparent late in her life.
The duo’s history took an unexpected and dark turn in March , when two women came forward to say they had been sexually assaulted by Chávez when they were teenage girls. Huerta told the New York Times that the venerated labor leader also had twice forced sex on her, resulting in two pregnancies.
Nearly 96 at the time, Huerta said she had remained silent for six decades to protect the farmworker movement. But she added: “I now understand that I am a survivor — of violence, of sexual abuse, of domineering men who saw me, and other women, as property, or things to control.”
Some wished Huerta had spoken out earlier, at least within the insular union, to prevent others from being victimized. But her many champions insisted the late-life revelation reflected badly only on Chávez, who for decades before his fall from grace had been an American civil rights icon and a virtual secular saint to the political left.
Some historians insist that Huerta be given full recognition for teaming with Chávez during much of the early foundational work that produced the UFW, from its founding in 1962 in the San Joaquin Valley farm town of Delano until she stopped working full-time for the union in the late 1980s.
It was Huerta who hurried from pickup truck to back stoop to pool hall to recruit many of the union’s first members; Huerta who stormed up and down picket lines to keep striking workers out of the fields; Huerta who helped negotiate one of the first contracts ever for farmworkers in North America; and Huerta who struggled to keep the union relevant as its membership and clout faded. She turned the phrase “Sí, se puede!” into a chant that animated rallies and marches well into a new century.
Complications and byzantine controversies helped stymie the union in its adolescence, with Huerta usually supporting Chávez, even as he became distracted from the union’s central work and demanded absolute power. The pair’s obsession with loyalty and often-imagined conspiracies ended with purges of some of the UFW’s most dynamic leaders, even as field hands continued to labor under abysmal conditions.
Huerta later devoted much of her time to women’s rights, Democratic Party politics and community organizing.
In 1999, the then-69-year-old great-grandmother helped obtain extra government benefits for workers who lost their jobs in a citrus freeze and stared across the contract bargaining table at lawyers for the giant Gallo wine company. Even late in life, she toured the nation as a public speaker and used her foundation to register voters and campaign for progressive causes. Liberal groups clamored to have Huerta at the front of their marches. Often sporting a jaunty red beret, she locked arms with activists one-quarter her age.
Her Dolores Huerta Foundation supported endeavors as diverse as a performing arts camp for children, higher education mentoring for high school students and food distribution to victims of floods that inundated the Central Valley in 2023. The foundation became something of a family business — headed by her daughter, Camila Chávez, and supported by legal advice from her son, Emilio Huerta, while four other relatives served on the board.
In another step to cement Huerta’s legacy, one of her nonprofits broke ground in 2025 for the Dolores Huerta Peace and Justice Cultural Center in Bakersfield, the San Joaquin Valley city she called home. The $35-million project, paid for largely by the state of California, will include an academy to teach future generations how to become community organizers.
“They are the ones who are going to guide us forward,” the then-95-year-old told a crowd, which stood under a scorching sun for the groundbreaking.
Through it all, Huerta insisted her primary loyalty remained la causa — the struggle to win better wages, working and living conditions for poor people, particularly farmworkers.
Beginning with the early organizing days in the 1960s, Huerta inspired passions almost as intense as her own. She won almost breathless admiration from followers for the way she faced down sometimes violent anti-union forces, worked for days with little rest and negotiated late into the night, while others faded. She alienated others with a waspish temper, an unwillingness to forgive even small slights and inattention to some of the details that make a union work.
To the union faithful, she was the “Madonna of the Fields.” Some said Huerta reminded them of the soldaderas, a handful of women warriors who followed Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa into battle during the Mexican Revolution. The growers, whom she almost always scorned, had another name for her: “the dragon lady.”
A woman of frenetic energy who lived in a world of myriad contradictions, Huerta was one of the only women in many board rooms and union halls full of men. She was a jet-setting, president-schmoozing pragmatist, who in unguarded moments spoke mystically about her two youthful encounters with UFOs. She was a devout Catholic who had the last four of her children with a man she never married, Richard Chávez, César’s younger brother. (Only in 2026 did she acknowledge having two other daughters, given to others to raise, fathered by César Chávez.)
Her relationship with César Chávez was as complex as it was volatile — a fact acknowledged by UFW regulars long before Huerta’s charges about his sexual misconduct.
The two met through their work for the Community Service Organization, or CSO, a progressive group that sought better government services and equal rights for poor and minority people. Both were called to the cause by the organization’s founder, Fred Ross Sr. — Huerta in Stockton and Chávez in San José — and later united over their common concern for farmworkers. But even when he became statewide leader of the CSO, Chávez could not persuade the group to focus its energies on organizing field workers.
It was 1961 and Chávez was living in East Los Angeles when he called Huerta to his home and said: “We have got to start the union. If we don’t do it, nobody else will,” Huerta once recalled. He left the CSO, and Huerta followed.
Both soon moved their families to the Kern County farm town of Delano. Chávez relied on Huerta for nearly everything. When she wasn’t going door-to-door to recruit new members, Huerta negotiated with growers and created union hiring halls. She formed farmworker ranch committees and moved to the East Coast for months to promote the union’s national grape boycott.
But Chávez and his right hand also clashed routinely during their decades-long collaboration. The two would explode in shouting matches over strategy, while other union leaders shrank from the room. In audio recordings of one 1979 confrontation reviewed by the New York Times, Huerta fought back and demanded respect as Chávez called her a “stupid bitch” and accused her of stealing. Huerta might quit, or be fired. Inevitably, she would be back in the fold within a few days or weeks.
“Their commitment to the cause trumped all else and grew into a mutual dependence that survived decades of discord,” wrote Miriam Pawel, a former Los Angeles Times editor, in the biography “The Crusades of Cesar Chavez.” Asked by ABC News if she tried to protect Chávez, Huerta replied, “Always. Always.”
During a wine grape strike in the Central Valley, Huerta and other UFW women once locked arms in a human blockade between the union’s male picketers and replacement workers wielding two-by-fours. She blocked one worker’s car with her own, to prevent him from going to work and breaking a 1965 strike against rose growers in McFarland.
Chávez never doubted Huerta’s resolve. He once called her “totally fearless, both mentally and physically.”
Her years of community organizing in Stockton taught Huerta how to inspire even the most humble of her poor constituents.
In the union’s founding days, Huerta helped recruit a 19-year-old grape picker named Eliseo Medina to perform a one-man picket at the Port of Los Angeles — supposedly to stop the loading of a shipment of non-union grapes. The grapes never materialized. But Medina recalled how Huerta’s spirit and determination galvanized him.
“Dolores had a gift for making you believe in yourself,” Medina said. “She has an ability to inspire you and urge you to do things you could not think were possible. She is one of those life-changers.”
Medina left the Chávez-Huerta-led union, believing it had strayed from its core work. He went on to become the international secretary treasurer of the more than 2-million-member Service Employees International Union — just one of many UFW acolytes who fueled the labor movement as it staged a modest resurgence in the 21st century.
Huerta was at the center of many of the union’s landmark achievements, including the negotiation of a contract in 1966 with the Schenley Wine Co. It was the first labor agreement obtained by farmworkers themselves with an agricultural company, according to the union’s history.
But the UFW’s fortunes would rise and fall. One low ebb came in 1973 with the loss of many contracts to the Teamsters Union, which struck sweetheart deals with growers. But some union insiders also complained that the UFW had failed by not winning enough concessions for the workers it represented. The union’s membership plummeted.
Two years later, momentum swung again, as the union helped persuade California Gov. Jerry Brownto impose the toughest farm labor regulations in the nation.
The union’s membership would spiral downward until Chávez’s death, at 66, in 1993. There was a sense among many insiders that the union became overly insular, with repeated purges designed to promote absolute fealty to Chávez.
In one incident, students graduating from English classes at the union’s headquarters, La Paz, ended a slide show with the words: “The Union is not César Chávez, the Union is not La Paz, the Union is the farmworkers.” Huerta, fuming, demanded to know which of the teachers had planted this message, which she viewed as an act of treason against Chávez — an episode detailed by one of the teachers, Jeffrey W. Rubin, who went on to become a history professor at Boston University.
“Confronted there by Huerta, Richard Chávez, and César Chávez himself, we were accused of being part of a subversive plot, railed at, called ‘chicken s—’ by César, and thrown out of La Paz and the union,” wrote Rubin, who kept the episode quiet for years.
At the same time, the UFW lost contracts and sometimes failed to provide the benefits it promised to workers. Huerta was one of many union leaders unable to set Chávez, and the UFW, on a better path.
As Chávez’s son-in-law Arturo Rodriguez took control of the union in 1993 and began clawing to regain members and clout, Huerta remained the UFW’s most public persona.
At hundreds of marches across the nation that she attended with regularity throughout her life, parents would push forward, telling their children they were witnessing a historic figure. Asked for an autograph, she would boldly scrawl: “Sí, se puede.”
The phrase — “Yes, it can be done” — had been part of the union’s fabric since 1972, when some doubters suggested the union would fail in its campaign against an anti-union law in Arizona. Huerta responded, “Sí, se puede,” creating a mantra for the American left.
Born April 10, 1930, in Dawson, a small mining town in the mountains of northern New Mexico, Dolores Clara Fernandez moved to Stockton when she was 3, along with her mother, two brothers and two sisters. Her father and mother had divorced, but Juan Fernandez’s legend had been fixed as a brawling union leader and New Mexico state legislator. Her mother, a hotel operator, believed in public service and would not let the poorest guests go hungry.
Dolores thrived on a middle-class upbringing of Girl Scouts, violin lessons and tap dancing, describing her mother’s generosity as a guiding force. She was bright and popular and even founded a teen center where she and other kids hung out.
But Dolores would recall her high school years as a time of slights and rewards not received — injustices she linked to her Mexican American heritage. When police ordered her teen center shut down, it became clear it was because they did not like whites socializing with Mexican American, Black and Filipino kids.
Those setbacks would not be forgotten.
After community college in Stockton, Huerta became a teacher. But she left after just a year, because, she said: “I thought I could do more by organizing farmworkers than by trying to teach their hungry children.”
Soon she met Ross and Chávez, and her life’s path would be set. Even her name seemed to brand her for the work. When she divorced her second husband, Ventura Huerta, Chávez advised her to hold on to her last name. Dolores Huerta means Sorrows of the Orchard.
Along the way, there would be great personal heartache.
In 1968, she was at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on the night Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was shot. The Democratic presidential front-runner had just finished his California primary victory speech — thanking Chávez and Huerta — when an assassin gunned him down.
Twenty years later, her politics thrust Huerta even more directly in the path of violence. A television camera captured a San Francisco police officer clubbing her as she and others peacefully picketed an appearance by Vice President George H.W. Bush. The blows ruptured Huerta’s spleen and nearly killed her.
She later won an $850,000 settlement from the city for the attack. Some in the union said that Chávez’s insistence that Huerta give the money up to the UFW created another rift that caused her to leave the union.
Huerta would struggle, as well, to find time for her expansive family — which in the end included 14 children, 24 grandchildren, 23 great-grandchildren and seven great-great-grandchildren, according to her foundation’s website.
One of her greatest heartaches grew out of the struggles of her oldest daughter, Celeste, a schizophrenic who, on occasion, would leave the institutions where she lived and wander the streets.
Huerta’s union zealotry would inspire a range of emotions from her other children.
“We understood very quickly she wasn’t ours to have,” said son Emilio, the lawyer, who is a Central Valley activist. “She sort of belonged to the farmworker movement. And it was our job to support her.”
He and several other Huerta offspring devoted their lives to the UFW and related causes, basking in a sense that their family played a part in history. That did not always make up for the personal slights — the times their mother would fob them off on union allies or neighbors, or miss a birthday.
In a bittersweet essay, Dolores’ daughter Juanita once recalled how her mother forgot to pick her up from junior high school. She compared Huerta to a train “rattling all the windows behind me, blaring out its horn, announcing its simultaneous arrival and departure with an incredible clamor, but rushing constantly forward.”
At a 69th birthday party in 1999, Huerta told a large dinner gathering that her own sacrifices had been overblown.
“It was our families who sacrificed,” she said. She then told a story about driving a carload of children to school one day in an automobile limping along because a tire had been slashed by union opponents. “That,” she said, “was kind of how we made it through life.”
Approaching her 90th birthday in 2020, Huerta spent a day that might have been more typical for someone half her age. She protested at the Fresno County Board of Supervisors for increased pay for home healthcare workers, who made just $12 an hour. Huerta hadn’t planned on being arrested that day, but when she felt police used excessive force on one of the protest leaders, she changed her mind. “Take me too,” she said, according to USA Today. Officers cinched a plastic zip-tie around her wrists and led her away.
More typically in her later years, she supported her foundation. In one moment, she might be campaigning for a bond measure for a middle school gym in the poor San Joaquin Valley community of Weedpatch; in seemingly the next, she would be stumping via Zoom for Joe Biden during his fight to take the White House from President Trump.
In 2020, USA Today named Huerta one of the 100 women “who’ve made a substantial impact on our country or our lives over the past 100 years.” By then, at least half a dozen schools across America bore her name. Others considered taking her name after they removed Chávez’s following the sexual abuse revelations.
President Obama presented Huerta with the country’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 2012 — a one-time community organizer, who made his way to the White House, honoring a woman still doing the work.
“The great social justice changes in our country have happened when people came together, organized and took direct action,” Huerta said in accepting the honor. “It is this right that sustains and nurtures our democracy today.”
Olvera, the family spokesperson, said Wednesday that Huerta’s relatives would be announcing the details of a public memorial in the coming days.

A United States cruise ship has suspended its around-the-world voyage in Cambodia, forcing hundreds of passengers to disembark with no confirmed departure date.
The MV Odyssey, operated by Florida-based Villa Vie Residences, arrived at the Cambodian port of Sihanoukville on Friday. The company said monthly fuel expenses per cabin, which historically averaged $1,800, had climbed to an estimated $6,000 to $8,000 in parts of Asia.
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The company said it tried to reduce consumption by slowing the ship and spending more time in port but could not offset the rising costs.
“We have been unable to continue carrying the resulting operating losses,” Villa Vie Residences said in a statement on Tuesday, adding that passing the full increase on to residents was not a realistic solution.
Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has been curtailed since the United States-Israel war on Iran began, squeezing supplies of petroleum-based fuels and pushing up prices, particularly in Southeast Asia.
The ship was carrying 203 passengers, mostly Americans, and 156 crew members, Cambodian officials said. Some passengers said they received only seven hours notice to disembark and had to arrange their own accommodation.
Paul and Lynn Montoya, a retired couple from the US state of Wyoming who boarded the ship 17 months ago, said they had expected to live at sea for years. They said the company had already struggled with itinerary changes, unreliable internet and declining food quality.
“We were tired of every two to four weeks being asked for money for fuel, money for everything,” Lynn Montoya said, alleging mismanagement and unpaid crew members.
Other passengers said they hoped a new company or a resident-led effort could save the venture.
Carol Larson, 69, who bought her cabin for $120,000 in instalments, said she did not regret taking the risk despite the suspension.
“I feel blessed to have been part of the experiment of residential cruising,” she said.
The ship set sail from Belfast, Northern Ireland, in October 2024 on a voyage originally planned to last three and a half years. Built in 1993, the ship was purchased by Villa Vie Residences in 2023 and offered cabins for long-term living with lifetime-vessel suites initially priced from about $230,000.
Cambodian officials said the ship was expected to refuel and leave on Saturday although the operator had not publicly confirmed a departure date.

The Department of Health and Human Services is giving compounding pharmacies a temporary green light to make six peptides while the agency continues to work on a formal rule change.
In a notice filed Wednesday, the agency said it would exercise “enforcement discretion,” meaning it will not take legal action against compounding pharmacies that make the six unapproved peptides. In practice, that means these pharmacies can start offering them now, even though the peptides aren’t yet on the Food and Drug Administration’s list of ingredients compounding pharmacies are allowed to make.
The six peptides are BPC-157, epitalon, KPV, MOTS-c, semax and TB-500.
They’ve been promoted online as treatments for everything from faster healing to younger-looking skin and a longer lifespan. None are approved by the FDA, and the agency’s own scientists concluded there is insufficient data to prove they are safe and effective.
The FDA said compounding pharmacies must certify the identity and purity of the compounds. They must also now report side effects, which was not previously mandated.
The move comes as a growing “gray market” has sprung up around peptides, where retailers sell them labeled “for research use only,” a legal workaround that lets them claim they aren’t meant for humans. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and others have argued that allowing peptides to be compounded would move people away from this gray market and toward safer products.
“Under President Trump’s leadership, HHS is working to put prevention and patient safety at the center of health care—and that includes confronting the risks of black-market peptides,” Emily Hilliard, an HHS spokesperson, said in a statement.
Dr. Peter Lurie, a former FDA official who now leads the Center for Science in the Public Interest watchdog group, said the FDA was essentially “turning a blind eye” to widen access to drugs that have not been proven to work.
Compounding pharmacies generally may use only ingredients the FDA has added to an official list known as the bulk drugs substances list. Adding an ingredient requires the FDA to propose a rule, take public comment and issue a final rule, a process that can take several months.
The agency took a step toward that process in July, when an FDA advisory panel narrowly voted in favor of adding six peptides to the bulk list. The panel included six new appointees with ties to the peptide industry and another who is the son of a U.S. representative who has pushed Kennedy to make peptides more available. (During that meeting, some committee members expressed concerns that the recommendation could make it harder for the FDA to say no to other unapproved drugs in the future.)
On Tuesday and Wednesday, the FDA was scheduled to meet outside groups, including Medivant Healthcare, a compounding pharmacy that offers peptides, according to Reginfo.gov, a federal website that tracks government regulations.
Shabbir Safdar, executive director of the Partnership for Safe Medicines, which researches the dangers of counterfeit medicines, said both the enforcement discretion and upcoming rule change would expose Americans to “untested dangerous substances.”
“Imagine what it means for the nation’s top drug regulator to announce they won’t enforce the laws on people making completely untested compounds and distributing them to the public,” Safdar said.

Optimistic mood inside Eisenkot camp
James Landale
Reporting from Eisenkot’s watch party
There were a lot of cheers as the numbers were read out here. But, like everybody, they are just trying to absorb what that means in the long run.
But the fact that some of their numbers were ahead, it seems they are taking that positively at the moment.
Remember, these are just the exit polls and sometimes these exit polls are incorrect, there are one or two outliers as we have seen.
This is just the start of a process.
I think people here are wise and experience to these elections, knowing that what happens here at the immediate phase of these exit polls doesn’t always result in the outcome that they might want at the end of the day.
But at the moment here, the mood is quite an optimistic one.
Music and dancing at Yashar HQ, but no-one from the party has taken the stage
Tom Bennett
Reporting from Eisenkot’s watch party in Tel Aviv
Here at Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar Party HQ in Tel Aviv, music is blasting and some of his supporters were dancing, singing and waving Israeli flags as the exit polls were just shown on the big screen.
But no party representatives have yet taken to the stage – and the hall is still half-empty, with lots of floor space in front of the TV crews and journalists from around the world who are here to take in the result.
Eisenkot’s so-called change bloc is projected to be larger than Netanyahu’s bloc, but still well short of a majority.
It is the Arab parties who are the story of the night. They are projected to get around 17 or 18 seats – a record for them.
Exit polls suggest Eisenkot bloc as largest in Israeli parliament but short of majority
The main Israeli broadcast exit polls indicate that challenger Gadi Eisenkot’s bloc has emerged as the largest group in Israel’s election, just ahead of the ruling coalition but well short of a majority.
Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Likud is set to be the biggest single party in the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset.
Arab Israeli parties have emerged with a record number of seats.
Official results will start being published from 22:00 GMT, but an estimated 600,000 absentee ballots – almost all from the military – and around 10% of the total votes, won’t be fully counted until Thursday.
Once all the results are in, and following consultations with all the political factions, Israel’s president then invites the party leader whom he believes has the best chance of success to form a governing coalition.
A process that can take many weeks.
Record voter turnout the story of the day so far
Tom Bennett
Eisenkot’s Yashar Party HQ
The story of election day so far has been the turnout – especially in some Arab-majority cities – which has reached record levels at points throughout the day.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has spent much of the day posting on social media that high Arab turnout is an “emergency” and a “matter of life or death” for the Israeli right.
If the Arab vote were to hold it could shrink both the main Jewish blocs – Netanyahu’s and Eisenkot’s – and knock out some of the smaller parties that hoped to pass the electoral threshold of 3.25%.
This would make it very difficult for anyone to form a government without the help or participation of at least one of the Arab party blocs – the United Arab List and the Joint List.
Most of the leading Jewish parties have ruled out working with them, meaning concessions, deals and U-turns may be needed to breach any impasse.
But it’s important to reiterate – until results roll in, it’s all speculation.
If no-one wins this election, how long could Netanyahu stay on?
Raffi Berg
Middle East digital editor
If neither current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc nor the opposition wins a majority of seats, Netanyahu will stay on as caretaker PM as attempts are made to form a government.
President Isaac Herzog will nominate the party leader whom he thinks stands the best chance of being able to do this.
This is a process which can take several months. If no candidate can form a government capable of winning the confidence of parliament, fresh elections will be called, and the process repeated.
In theory, this means Netanyahu could continue as caretaker prime minister for months and even years, with most of his powers.
This has actually previously happened: Netanyahu himself holds the record for length of time serving as a caretaker prime minister, for a year and a half between December 2018 and May 2020.
In that period, three indecisive elections were held, until Netanyahu finally formed a unity government with his main political rival.
‘No justification’ to extend voting hours, elections committee says
The Central Elections Committee has decided not to extend voting hours in the Israeli elections.
In a statement, the committee says it met this evening and decided “the current circumstances do not justify an extension”.
It adds the high turnout “reflects strong public engagement in the democratic process” and “no need to extend voting hours was identified”.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party and several other right wing parties had asked for voting to be extended beyond 22:00 (20:00 GMT).
It came after the Israeli prime minister posted on social media about a reportedly high turnout among Arab voters.
Netanyahu labelled it an “emergency” and a “matter of life or death” for the Israeli right, and called on his supporters to get out and vote.
Who are the major parties?
Likud – The governing right-wing party founded in 1973. Led by PM Benjamin Netanyahu continuously since 2005 and has been in power for all but one year since 2009.
Yashar – Centrist party formed in 2025 by Gadi Eisenkot. The retired Israeli army chief’s son was killed fighting in Gaza. Leader of the anti-Netanyahu “Change bloc”.
Beyachad – Centre-right party formed in April 2026, led by former PM Naftali Bennett. Part of the anti-Netanyahu “Change bloc”.
The Democrats – Left-leaning party founded in 2024, led by former Israeli army deputy chief of staff Yair Golan. Part of the anti-Netanyahu “Change bloc”.
Yisrael Beiteinu – A right-wing secular, nationalist party, founded in 1999. Led by Avigdor Lieberman. Part of the anti-Netanyahu “Change bloc”.
Otzma Yehudit – Far-right nationalist party founded in 2012. Led by National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir. Willing to join a Netanyahu coalition.
Religious Zionist Party – Far-right nationalist party founded in 2021. Led by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. Willing to join a Netanyahu coalition.
Ultra-Orthodox parties – Shas, founded in 1984, and United Torah Judaism (UTJ), founded in 1992, are the main parties, historically politically allied with Netanyahu. The Haredi Public Party, founded in July 2026, as an alternative to Shas and UTJ, is also running. Willing to join a Netanyahu coalition.
United Arab List – A conservative, Arab-led party with Islamist roots, United Arab List (Ra’am) was founded in 1996. Led by Mansour Abbas. Willing to be part of a non-Netanyahu coalition.
Joint List – An alliance of three mostly Arab parties, led by Yousef Jabareen. Willing to support a non-Netanyahu coalition from outside government.
Security, conscription and judicial reform have all been key issues
Tom Bennett
in Tel Aviv
Security has been the topic dominating campaigning.
Netanyahu’s challengers have all heavily criticised the security failures that led to the 7 October attacks, in which around 1,200 people were killed and 251 others taken back to Gaza as hostages.
Nevertheless, Netanyahu has once again framed himself as “Mr Security”, pointing to strategic victories in Israel’s wars since 2023.
Conscription is also a major topic. Historically, ultra-Orthodox Jewish men in full-time religious study have been exempt from military service, but since war broke out this has become an increasingly divisive policy.
Judicial reform has also featured heavily during the campaign. Netanyahu’s government is still pursuing contentious plans for reforms to the judicial system, which led to mass protests before 7 October.
Critics say the plans would compromise the independence of the judiciary and threaten democracy.
As in many countries, cost of living is another key issue. Food and housing costs have grown steadily in recent years.
What is the Knesset and how are seats allocated?
Israel uses a system of proportional representation to elect political parties its parliament, called the Knesset.
There are 120 seats in the Knesset, which are allocated in direct proportion to the number of votes a party receives nationally. People vote for a single party, not individual candidates.
The party provides a ranked list of its candidates and they are given Knesset seats depending on the party’s final seat total.
A single party has never won enough of the 120 seats to command a majority, which means every government is a coalition of at least two parties.
This gives the smaller parties considerable power to make or break a coalition government.