Tel Aviv University researchers working from Central Bureau of Statistics data counted 268,509 departures from Israel of three months or longer across 2023, 2024 and 2025, and 90,922 people who stayed abroad for three or more consecutive months during 2025 alone [1]. The finding attached to those counts is that emigration has held at roughly 45,000 to 50,000 a year for a third consecutive year [1].
Those figures do not sit comfortably beside one another, and the gap deserves walking through rather than rounding off. Divide the three year total evenly and it comes to about 89,500 departures a year. That is arithmetic performed here on the total, not a rate the study is quoted as publishing, and it lands close to the 90,922 counted for 2025. Either way, the raw counts are roughly double the annual range the headline finding describes.
The likeliest reason is that the numbers count different populations. A departure of three months or longer is a border crossing with a duration attached to it. A person who spends four months on a contract abroad and comes home is inside that count. A person who stayed abroad three or more consecutive months during 2025 is a different measure again, describing where people were rather than how many times they left, and the same person can generate more than one departure in a year. Emigration in the sense the 45,000 to 50,000 range is meant to capture is narrower still: people who left and did not come back.
The step that gets from 268,509 departures to an annual range less than half that size is the entire finding, and it is not visible in the material available here. Reconciling it would take the study's own definition of the annual figure, its treatment of returnees, and the year by year breakdown behind the three year total. Absent those, the 45,000 to 50,000 range should be reported as the researchers' characterization of their data rather than as a total anyone can rebuild from the counts they published. Quoting 90,922 as an annual emigration figure would be wrong for the same reason in the opposite direction.
One comparison in the release cuts hard against the alarmed reading. The historical baseline for 2010 through 2019 was roughly 60,000 a year [1]. A current figure of 45,000 to 50,000 sits below it. Whatever else the last three years have done to Israeli life, the annual number the researchers report is smaller than what the 2010s produced year after year, and any account of this data that leaves the baseline out is leaving out the number that most changes its meaning.
The researchers do not treat their own figures as pure reassurance. They write: "These figures on their own do not yet pose a threat to Israel's resilience. However, looking ahead... there is growing concern that emigration will escalate in a manner that endangers Israel's security and economy" [1]. Read closely, that is a claim about trajectory rather than about the current level, and the current level is the only thing the counts here actually establish.
There is one further wrinkle worth naming rather than smoothing. The source page describes record emigration continuing for a third consecutive year, a framing that reads oddly next to an annual figure below the 2010 to 2019 baseline. Both can hold if the record refers to the departure counts rather than to the annual emigration estimate, which is a reading of the two numbers rather than a confirmation of anything. Someone should put the study itself in front of that word before it travels further.
The practical version is this. Three years of steady numbers is a finding. Ninety thousand departures in a year is a finding. They are not the same finding, and the release circulating today lets one be quoted as though it were the other.
