Tel Aviv study counts 1,370 doctors who left Israel for a year or more

About 1,370 Israeli doctors spent at least twelve months outside the country between 2023 and 2025, according to a Tel Aviv University study released on 6 September. That is a 94 percent increase on the 705 doctors who left in the comparable three years from 2013 to 2015. The authors are Prof. Itai Ater of the Coller School of Management, Prof. Nittai Bergman, head of the Eitan Berglas School of Economics, and doctoral student Doron Zamir.

The year-by-year count is 416 in 2023, 530 in 2024, and a preliminary 419 in 2025. The last figure is not closed. Even after counting doctors who came back, Israel lost a net 509 physicians in 2023 and 2024, about 255 a year. The authors say the annual net loss in the 2010s averaged 54. Five times that rate is the number they want the health ministry to sit with.

The researchers matched the population registry, education records and licensing files through a Central Bureau of Statistics research programme. They did not rely on exit interviews or union surveys. A doctor who keeps an Israeli licence and lives abroad for a year still counts. That definition captures people who take a fellowship and stay, people who move a household, and people who mean to return and have not yet done so.

Specialties did not leave in equal shares. Some 215 internal-medicine physicians left, 3.9 percent of that workforce. Surgeons accounted for 188 people, 6 percent of surgeons. Ophthalmology, dermatology and ear, nose and throat together lost 116 doctors, 6.2 percent of those fields. Intensive-care doctors left at 4.7 percent. The study notes that the three-year outflow is roughly the size of the combined medical staff at Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center and Bnai Zion in Haifa.

Age shifted as well. Doctors aged 45 and older made up about 20 percent of those who left in 2023-2025, 281 people. A decade earlier the share was 14 percent. Experienced specialists take longer to replace than residents. Training a surgeon is measured in years. Importing one is measured in licensing fights.

The paper does not assign a single cause. Any reader in Israel can list the candidates without help from a dean: the war that began in October 2023, reserve duty that pulls hospital staff into uniform, judicial-overhaul politics that split the professions in the months before the war, pay, hours, and the pull of English-speaking hospital systems that will hire a board-certified specialist in weeks. The authors, one of whom heads a forum called Economists for Democracy, work in a university that has been inside those fights. The tables they published can be read without accepting any one story about motive.

Health systems feel this kind of loss first in waiting lists and then in emergency rooms. A 6 percent hit to surgery and to the small specialist groups that handle eyes, skin and throats shows up as cancelled lists and longer queues, not as a blackout. The net figure of 255 doctors a year is the one that compounds. If 2026 looks like 2024, the country will have lost another full mid-size hospital’s worth of physicians before the next study is written.

What the ministry can do is limited and obvious: pay, reserve-duty rules that do not empty wards on the same weekend, and a licensing path that brings some of the 1,370 back without a two-year wait. What it cannot do is replay 2013. The comparison year is useful only as a baseline. The war and the politics that sit on either side of it are the conditions in which the new baseline was set.