Israel: Bennett's Yamina trails 3 seats behind Netanyahu's Likud in poll
Poll shows gov't possible without Likud if Yamina, Yesh Atid, Yisrael Beiteinu and Blue and White join forces
Yamina, a right-wing party chaired by former Defense Minister Naftali Bennett, trailed just three seats behind Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud in a poll released Sunday by Israel's Channel 13.
If elections were held now, Likud would secure 27 seats in the 120-seat Knesset (Israel Parliament), the survey revealed, while Yamina would have 24 mandates.
Yesh Atid, chaired by the head of the opposition and firebrand Netanyahu critic Yair Lapid, would come third with its 21 seats.
The predominantly Arab Joint List, which currently has 15 mandates, would cede four of those, the poll showed.
Benny Gantz's Blue and White, Avigdor Liberman's Yisrael Beiteinu and Aryeh Deri's ultra-Orthodox Shas party would all garner eight seats each.
They are followed by United Torah Judaism, with its seven seats, and six mandates for the left-wing Meretz party, while the Labour party - which dominated Israeli politics for at least the first 30 years of the country's existence - would fail to clear the electoral threshold.
With at least 61 seats needed to form a government, the current coalition, comprised of Likud, Blue and White and religious right-wing parties, would sit at 50 seats.
On the opposition side, Yamina, Yesh Atid and Israel Beiteinu, if joining forces, would hold 53 seats -- also short of the ruling majority unless Blue and White, which Yesh Ayid broke off from, were to join in with their eight seats, pushing the bloc to 61 mandates.
Yamina, which sat in the previous government but splintered off after the spring elections, has been surging in the recent polls as the government has faced a wave of criticism for its handling of the coronavirus pandemic, including the reimposition of a nationwide lockdown over the Jewish High Holy Days.