Channel 12 journalist Amit Segal believes that Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked and her Jewish Home party brought the right-wing bloc to victory - even though the party itself did not pass the electoral threshold.
In his opinion, the votes that Shaked's party received raised the electoral threshold by hundreds of votes, which may well be those Meretz lacks in order to enter the Knesset.
"Do you remember the clash on Twitter, between [Meretz chief Zehava] Galon and Shaked? So Shaked, with her running in coordination with the Likud over the past week, apparently brought down Meretz and raised the right-wing bloc by three Knesset seats," Segal wrote on Telegram.
On Monday, Shaked hinted that her running had been coordinated with the Likud: "Our running is strategic and after the elections, you will understand why," she said then.
According to the current vote count, 47,555 people voted for the Jewish Home party; there are still half a million votes which have not yet been counted.
On Tuesday evening, Shaked told journalists outside her home, "If the exit polls are correct, then I want to congratulate [MK] Benjamin Netanyahu on his achievement and the entire right-wing bloc. I hope they form a stable government quickly."
"We went with our truth and with our ideology. We were a home to 80,000 voters who would not have gone to vote in another fashion, and I am very proud of that."
Turning to her party's activists, she added, "We fought like lions. I want to tell you a big thank you - we knew that it would be a very tough battle, but we went with our truth and with our ideology."