Over 1.8 million Israelis live below the poverty line, government says

Some 1.8 million Israelis live below the national poverty line, an end-of-year government report says.

The annual Poverty Report by the Welfare Ministry and National Insurance Institute shows 1,810,500 people, 841,700 of them children, are defined as poor by Israel’s official poverty measures. That’s 469,400 families.

The figures show a rise in the number of elderly poor. The percentage of households headed by an elderly person that were under the poverty line rose from 21.8 percent in 2017 to 23.4% in 2018, while the percentage of elderly individuals who are poor rose from 17.2% to 18.8%.

Israel’s poverty line measures inequality, not absolute income. It is defined as half the median income, and so rises as incomes rise across the board. That means that the poverty rate itself is not enough to understand the financial and overall welfare condition of poorer Israelis. If the wealthy get wealthier, more people fall below the poverty line, even if their incomes are stable or even slowly increasing.