Happy New Year—Israel's Population Almost at 9.5 Million

In spite of pandemics and war, the population of Israel continues to steadily grow and will be close to 9.5 million people as we begin 2022.

According to the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS), in one final release on Thursday of numbers for 2021, there are 9.449 million people living in Israel. The population consists of 6.892 million (74 percent) Jews, 1.99 million (21 percent) Arabs, and 472,000 (5 percent) who are of another ethnicity.

The number of Israelis grew at 1.7 percent thanks to births, and immigration—83 percent of the increase was from natural arrivals (births) and 17 percent by international "arrivals" (immigrants). In 2021, 184,000 babies were born—74 percent to Jewish homes, 23 percent to Arab homes, 3 percent to other ethnicities. This year also saw an influx of 25,000 new immigrants move to Israel, as well as 9,000 non-citizens. Both immigration and births are up from 2020.

Among those arriving from other countries to Israel in 2021, most were Russian (30 percent), then France (15 percent), the United States (14 percent), and Ukraine (12 percent).

There were close to 51,000 deaths in Israel in 2021 (compared to 50,000 in 2020 and 45,000 in 2019). Since March 2020 in Israel, an estimated 8,243 Israelis have died due to COVID-19.