a country · IsraelIsrael

A small inbound trade run largely inside public hospitals, regulated since 2019 by a statute that exists to stop foreign patients from displacing Israeli ones. The Ministry of Health puts arrivals at roughly 30,000 a year on Ministry of Tourism data, most of them from Russia, Ukraine, eastern Europe, Cyprus and neighbouring countries. Israel also sits inside a system of movement permits that determines whether Palestinian patients referred out of the occupied territory reach their appointments, and that system is counted separately, by the World Health Organization.

The commercial argument arrived before the law did: public hospitals with spare theatre capacity, salaried consultants, and foreign patients paying cash rates several times the domestic tariff. The counter-argument was that an Israeli patient waiting for the same theatre was being moved down a list. The Knesset settled it in statute. The Medical Tourism Law, 5778-2018 came into force on 29 January 2019, and the Ministry of Health describes its purpose in those terms — "to prevent negative impact on the treatment provided to the Israeli patient, to increase revenues to the Israeli economy from medical tourism activity and to ensure professional and ethical treatment of the medical tourist".

What the law does is register the middlemen and bind the hospitals. Agents must appear on a Ministry of Health register and operate to the statute; an institution treating a foreign patient must send a written invitation setting out the treatment offered and its price quote, and may not give that patient preference over a non-travelling one in appointments, admission or hotel services. Inference — a rule that has to say a paying foreigner may not be given the earlier slot is a rule written because that was happening.

Separately, and on a different footing, Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip referred to hospitals in East Jerusalem, Israel or abroad require an Israeli-issued permit to travel. WHO's report to the Seventy-sixth World Health Assembly, dated 17 May 2023, records that in 2022 a third — 33 per cent, over 6,500 — of the 20,295 patient permit applications from the Gaza Strip were not approved in time for the hospital appointment, and 15 per cent, over 13,000, of the 87,721 patient permit applications from the West Bank were denied. Approval varied by reason for referral: 87 per cent for oncology against 58 per cent for neurology among Gaza patients in December 2022. Companions fared worse: 62 per cent of 26,461 companion applications from Gaza were not approved by the date of the patient's appointment.

An inbound patient is quoted in writing by the institution, books through a registered agent or directly, and is treated in a department whose main work is domestic. Fertility, oncology and bone-marrow work are the specialties most often named. Payment is private and priced separately from the national health basket. A referral out of the occupied Palestinian territory follows a different route entirely: a Palestinian Ministry of Health referral, a permit application, and an appointment that may or may not survive the permit's timing.

As of September 2026 the Ministry of Health's own published estimate — roughly 30,000 arrivals a year — is the figure this record carries, and it is an estimate credited to the Ministry of Tourism rather than a register of treated patients. The 2018 law is in force. The permit figures above are the most recent annual set this project read in a WHO governing-body document.

Two different things are described on this page and they are not the same subject: a priced private trade, and an access regime measured in permit approvals. This record reports both and argues neither.