Israel's 26th Knesset takes office with 46 newcomers and a record 33 women as government talks continue

Israel's 26th Knesset will be sworn in on Tuesday afternoon in a festive ceremony in Jerusalem, as 120 lawmakers — 46 of them serving for the first time — take their seats in the newly elected parliament. The ceremony will be attended by President Isaac Herzog, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana, and will set several records, including the highest number of women ever to sit in the chamber, at 33.

The day's events begin in the morning, when the newly elected lawmakers arrive at the Knesset complex, and build towards the formal ceremony at 3:20pm in the Knesset plaza, where Herzog will arrive accompanied by a motorcycle escort and mounted horsemen. The festive plenary session itself begins at 4pm, when the Knesset secretary-general will announce the president's entrance, three trumpet fanfares will sound, and Herzog will open the session with three strikes of the gavel before delivering an address.

Herzog will then invite Ohana to take the oath of office and hand over the chairmanship of the session. After the speaker delivers his remarks, the Knesset secretary will call the names of all 120 elected lawmakers one by one, and each will rise in turn and declare, "I pledge." The celebrations will conclude with a blessing over wine by the speaker and a festive toast marking the beginning of the new parliament's term, with singer Harel Skaat performing at the event.

The new parliament includes 46 lawmakers who will hold a mandate for the first time, and several members of bereaved families are among those entering the chamber. On Sunday, the newcomers took part in an orientation day at the Knesset, testing the voting system in the plenary hall and casting their votes in turn, with some posing for photographs to commemorate the occasion.

But the ceremony takes place against a backdrop of deep political uncertainty. The election produced no straightforward coalition majority, and negotiations over forming a government are ongoing. President Herzog has tasked Yashar party leader Gadi Eisenkot with forming the next government, after Eisenkot secured the backing of 67 lawmakers. By law, he has 28 days from Sunday to complete the task, and the president may extend the deadline by another 14 days if necessary.

The arithmetic of the new Knesset explains the deadlock. Prime Minister Netanyahu's bloc won 53 seats, while the bloc of his opponents won 48, and neither side commands the 61-vote majority required to form a government. Two Arab-majority lists won an unprecedented 19 seats in the election, a result that has reshaped the balance of power and made every faction's support harder to secure.

The question of the Knesset speaker has already threatened to overshadow the inauguration. Eisenkot's bloc has submitted requests to replace Ohana, a close Netanyahu ally, as speaker, and has approached the ultra-Orthodox parties Shas and United Torah Judaism for support. Ohana has said a vote on replacing him will be held within a week if a letter bearing the signatures of at least 61 lawmakers is submitted, while ruling out holding it on inauguration day itself.

The speaker's chair matters because whoever holds it controls the legislative agenda, and the opposition bloc wants to use that control to set the terms of the coming political battle. UTJ chairman Yaakov Asher has argued that a new speaker should be chosen only when a government is formed, while others point to the 2020 precedent, when the High Court intervened after then-speaker Yuli Edelstein refused to convene a vote on his replacement.

Reports of alleged plans to disrupt a future speaker vote have added to the tension, although the allegations remain unsubstantiated. Outside the Knesset, a protest was being held under the slogan "We do not replace a Knesset speaker with the votes of Hamas supporters," a sign of how bitterly the contest is being fought in public as well as in private.

For Israel, the swearing-in marks the start of a new political chapter, but not yet a resolution of the old one. The 120 lawmakers taking the oath on Tuesday will sit in a parliament that is more diverse than any before it — younger, more female, and more fragmented — and their first task will be to decide who leads it, and who leads the country. Until those questions are answered, the ceremony's pageantry will sit alongside a government-formation process that could take weeks to complete.