A top Palestinian official said Monday that initial Israeli election exit polls, indicating a victory for right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, showed that "annexation" had won.

Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said the exit polls by Israeli media showed that: "settlement, annexation and apartheid have won the Israeli elections. Netanyahu's campaign was about the continuation of the occupation and conflict." Erekat wrote on Twitter, saying the result would "force the people of the region to live by the sword: continuation of violence, extremism and chaos."

Netanyahu faced an uncertain path to stay in office, even as preliminary results showed his Likud party pulling ahead of its opponents in the country's third election in less than a year.

Exit polls on Israeli TV stations showed Likud and its allies claimed 59 seats out of the 120 in parliament. That would still put Likud and its ultra-religious and nationalist bloc short of the parliamentary majority required to form a government.

The uncertainty didn't stop Netanyahu from declaring victory early Tuesday in front of a raucous crowd of supporters. "This is a victory against all the odds because we stood against powerful forces," he said. "They already eulogized us. Our opponents said the Netanyahu era is over." He vowed to immediately begin work to form a new coalition and press forward with a hard-line agenda that includes annexing large parts of the occupied West Bank.

As Netanyahu plays the Palestinian card each time, he promised to annex the West Bank, expand illegal Israeli settlements and take harsher measures against the threats that he claims are coming from the Palestinians.

Lately, he pledged Sunday to annex key parts of the occupied West Bank within "weeks" if re-elected. In December, Netanyahu had stated that Israel has the "full right" to annex the Jordan Valley if it chose to.

The Palestinians seek all the West Bank, captured by Israel in 1967, as the heartland of their hoped-for state. They see the territory as a vital part of their planned future state and have said such annexation would mean an end to the notion of peace based on the two-state solution. The Jordan Valley comprises 25% of the West Bank and is seen as the territory’s breadbasket and one of the few remaining open areas that could be developed by the Palestinians.