Hidden cost of war: 125,000 Israelis emigrated between 2022 and 2024

Knesset report shows a ‘tsunami’ of Israelis leaving the country with no plans to return, possibly linked to Gaza war

By Zev Stub

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20 October 2025, 4:51 pm Edit

Zev Stub is the Times of Israel's Diaspora Affairs correspondent.

More than 125,000 Israeli citizens moved abroad between early 2022 and mid-2024, the country’s largest-ever loss of human capital in such a short period, according to a report presented on Monday to the Knesset’s Immigration and Absorption Committee.

The report, compiled by the Knesset Research and Information Center, said that Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza may have been a factor causing the number of Israelis leaving the country permanently to skyrocket during those years.

Other factors mentioned in a previous report in February, including the political unrest that culminated in mass protests against the government’s judicial overhaul plan in 2023 and the ripple effects of the Russian-Ukrainian war, were not explicitly mentioned.

The trend is believed to have continued through 2025, as the war in Gaza stretched on.

“This is not a wave of emigration, it’s a tsunami of Israelis choosing to leave the country,” said committee chairman MK Gilad Kariv. He noted that Israel’s government does not currently have a plan to address the problem of Israelis leaving, and said his committee would work to tackle the issue in the future.

Israel’s net migration balance of citizens — the number of citizens leaving without intending to come back, minus the number of long-term returnees — fell by 125,200 people between the beginning of 2022 and August 2024, the report found.

Some 59,400 Israelis left the country in 2022, and an all-time high 82,800 left in 2023, according to the report. In 2024, nearly 50,000 people left between January and August, the report said.

MK Gilad Kariv at a meeting of the Knesset Immigration and Absorption Committee, October 20, 2025 (Dani Shem-Tov/ Office of the Knesset Spokesperson)

For perspective, the average number of long-term emigrants between 2009 and 2021 was approximately 40,500 per year, the report said.

Meanwhile, 29,600 Israelis living abroad returned to Israel in 2022, 24,200 returned in 2023, and 12,100 returned in the first eight months of 2024, the report said.

While in previous decades, most of the Israelis who left the country were seeking things like upward mobility, success and education, now, the main factor driving people away is the political and security situation, according to research by Lilach Lev Ari, a professor of sociology at Oranim College.

The data, compiled by Dr. Ayala Eliyahu, used the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) definition of emigrants as those leaving Israel for at least 275 days abroad within a year of departure, and returning Israelis as those who return for at least 275 days in a year after such a stay overseas.

The National Insurance Institute can begin to terminate one’s residency in Israel after five years of residence abroad, although citizens can take the initiative to cancel their residency themselves, attorney Danny Zaken of the NII noted. Such requests have more than tripled from an average of 2,500 before 2021 to 8,400 in 2024, he noted.

The report’s calculation of a negative migration of 125,200 did not include new immigrants. Israel received more than 74,000 new citizens in 2022, 46,000 in 2023, and about 24,000 in the first eight months of 2024, according to CBS figures.

In 2025, immigration from Western countries rose from the past year, driven in large part by rising antisemitism abroad and a resurgence in excitement for the Zionist cause since the Hamas invasion of October 7, 2023, aliyah advocates have noted. However, immigration levels from the US, France, UK, Canada and other countries are still low compared to a decade ago.

Passengers look at a departure board at Ben Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv, as flights are canceled and delayed because of a massive surprise attack by Hamas, on October 7, 2023. (Gil Cohen-Magen/AFP)

The Immigration and Absorption Ministry does not have a plan to stem the tide of emigration, noted the ministry’s director of aliyah, Eric Michaelson.

“We are not a ministry for preventing emigration, and we do not have a mandate to stop the process of emigration from the country,” Michaelson told the committee. “[Only] immigrants and returning residents are under the care of the Immigration and Absorption Ministry, and we work to keep them in the country for a long time.”

Immigration and Absorption Minister Ofir Sofer has led the ministry to initiate a number of improvements to the immigration process in the past year, and the ministry will be hosting a conference on strengthening immigration as a vehicle of Israel’s economic growth on Wednesday in Tel Aviv.

Kariv called on the Immigration and Absorption Ministry to formulate a strategic plan to encourage Israeli citizens abroad to return, and to implement a specific mechanism to monitor academic staff who leave Israel and go to work at universities abroad, a phenomenon often referred to as brain drain.