TEL AVIV (Dispatches) -- Israel lost 1,369 doctors to emigration between 2023 and 2025, a 94 percent surge fueled by insecurity and political turmoil, in what the head of the Israel Medical Association (IMA) called a “strategic threat” to the illegal entity, Ynet reported.
According to the IMA survey presented by its chair, Zion Hagai, at a conference on the exodus, hospital managers cited Israel’s security and political situation, career advancement, higher pay, better working conditions, and personal reasons as the main drivers of the departures. 
The 1,369 figure, drawn from a Tel Aviv University study reported in September, compares with 705 doctors who left between 2013 and 2015.
The trend extends to all branches of medicine, according to a Tel Aviv University study reported in September, with ENT, dermatology, and ophthalmology losing 9.4 percent of their doctors under 60, the highest rate of any field and a blow to the core of the workforce.
With fewer doctors coming back, Israel recorded a net loss of 509 doctors in 2023 and 2024 once returnees were counted, roughly 255 a year and close to five times the annual average between 2010 and 2019.
Beyond doctors, Israel is losing the high earners whose taxes fund its war economy, with the departure rate among the country’s top 10th of earners rising by about 80 percent compared with 2015 to 2019, according to the Hebrew daily Calcalist.
Of all the income tax that departing Israelis paid before they left, 86 percent came from this top tenth of earners alone.
Over the same period, the number of people leaving Israel’s healthcare sector has more than doubled, and the number leaving high tech has risen by around 150 percent.
Each year’s emigrants in 2023 and 2024 had together paid around 1.2 billion shekels – nearly $400 million – in income tax before leaving, more than twice the amount paid by those who left before 2019, according to the Israeli tax authority. 
If the trend continues, Israel could be losing close to 3.5 billion shekels – or $1.13 billion – in tax revenue a year within five years.
The flight of doctors and top earners is part of a wider exodus of around 100,000 Israeli settlers who left the occupied territories in 2023 and 2024, according to earlier findings by the same Tel Aviv University researchers.
A separate 2024 Hebrew University survey, carried out at the World Zionist Organization’s initiative, found that 80 percent of Israeli settlers living abroad have no plans to return.
The exodus has been fueled by the fallout from Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its wars on Lebanon, Iran, and Yemen, which drew retaliatory strikes from the Axis of Resistance that have battered the Israeli economy and deepened the illegal entity’s insecurity.