Children and parents of Sderot making kites for the festival. Photo: Sderot Municipality Spokesperson

Israel’s Jewish birth count is rising again in 2026, extending a striking demographic rebound even as the country grapples with war, political turmoil, and elevated emigration.

New data from Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) show that 66,753 babies were born to Jewish mothers in the first six months of 2026, up 2.6 percent from 65,091 during the same period last year.

The increase was not confined to a single month. Jewish births rose year-over-year in March, April, May, and June, with the latter jumping more than 4 percent compared with June 2025.

Over the 12 months ending in June, 137,343 Jewish babies were born in Israel — higher than any annual total in the CBS table going back to 1996. Across the entire Israeli population, births reached 185,344 during the same 12-month period, also slightly above the previous recent peak of 185,040 in 2021.

The figures mark a notable reversal from the decline that followed Israel’s pre-pandemic baby boom.

In 2022, The Algemeiner reported that Israeli births had fallen from a then-record 184,370 in 2018 to 177,307 in 2020, while the country’s total fertility rate slipped from 3.01 children per woman in 2019 to 2.9 in 2020. Even then, however, Israel remained an extraordinary outlier among developed countries, with fertility far above the average for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), an international group of dozens of high-income, democratic countries.

The longer-term shift within Israel is even more dramatic.

When The Algemeiner reported on CBS figures in 2015, Arab women still had slightly more children on average than Jewish women — 3.17 versus 3.11 — although the once-enormous gap between the two populations had nearly disappeared. In the early 2000s, Arab fertility had been roughly 4.3 children per woman compared with about 2.6 among Jews.

That relationship has since reversed.

The latest full fertility data show Jewish women averaging 3.07 children in 2024, compared with 2.59 among Arab women. Jewish fertility had stood at just 2.64 in 2002, while Arab fertility was 4.19.

The newest monthly figures suggest that the divergence may be continuing at the level of births, although they do not yet establish that fertility per woman itself has risen in 2026.

While Jewish births increased 2.6 percent in the first half of this year, Arab births rose only about 0.5 percent and Muslim births about 0.4 percent. In June alone, Jewish births rose 4.2 percent from a year earlier, while Arab births fell 4.1 percent and Muslim births dropped 4.4 percent.

Still, Israel’s Arab population continues to grow faster overall because it is younger and has proportionally more people entering childbearing ages. The Jewish population increased from roughly 7.27 million in July 2025 to 7.35 million in July 2026, while the Arab population grew from 2.12 million to 2.17 million.

Israel remains a stark outlier among wealthy countries, where falling birth rates have become the norm. While fertility across most of the OECD sits well below the roughly 2.1 children per woman needed to maintain a population without immigration, Israel’s total fertility rate was 2.87 in 2024 — and 3.07 among Jewish women.

Israel is the only OECD country that has consistently remained above replacement-level fertility in recent years, making its demographic trajectory increasingly unusual as governments from Europe to East Asia struggle with shrinking families and aging populations.