18 lists submitted on day one — and the committee stresses: submission is not approval

What happened

The process of submitting candidate lists for the 26th Knesset began on Monday, 7 September 2026, at the Knesset, supervised by the chairman of the Central Elections Committee, Supreme Court Justice Noam Sohlberg. Per a report by Amir Ettinger in ynet (7 September 2026), the process ran until shortly before 19:00.

At the end of day one the Elections Committee announced that 18 candidate lists had been submitted, and clarified:

> "The submission of the lists does not constitute their approval. The lists, the names and the letters requested will be examined by the Central Elections Committee in accordance with the provisions of the law."

Per the committee's timetable, 8 September 2026 is the second and final submission day (section 57(i)).

The lists submitted on day one

On the Central Elections Committee's site, on a page updated 7 September 2026, the 18 lists appear with the ballot letters they requested:

The committee states explicitly: "These lists are not final and the Central Elections Committee has not yet approved them." Approval of the lists is set for 27 September 2026 and their publication for 18 October 2026.

Why this matters to a reader

This is the point at which options close. From submission onward, the candidates' names and their order on a list are no longer subject to internal party negotiation — from here the process is the committee's legal review. Anyone who wants to know whether a given list carries community representation, this is the document to check, and each list is published on its own page on the committee's site.

We checked the candidate names on the lists submitted on day one; we wrote separately about what we found, in the article on community representation on the lists.

Tedros reports this as political fact and takes no position.

Sources

• Central Elections Committee — "Candidate lists for the Knesset", gov.il, updated 7 Sept 2026
• ynet, 7 Sept 2026 — Amir Ettinger, "The names and the lists: these are the candidates of the 2026 elections"
• Central Elections Committee — statutory activity timetable, gov.il