How an Australian Visitor Was Paid After a Netanya Hit and Run

Result: NIS 462,000 paid by Karnit for a hit and run in which the driver was never traced, settled without an Israeli hearing · Timeline: 18 months from instruction in Melbourne to payment · Challenge: Unidentified driver, claimant living 14,000 kilometres away · Authority: Karnit, the Fund for Compensation of Road Accident Victims · Financial Impact: NIS 462,000 recovered, against a travel insurer recoupment resolved at AUD 24,000

Background

She is a part time bookkeeper in Melbourne, 58 at the time, in Israel for three weeks to meet a new grandchild. On the fourth evening she crossed a road two streets back from the Netanya seafront, in a marked crossing, and a car coming out of a side street hit her left leg and drove on. Her daughter was ten metres behind her and saw a dark hatchback with no clear view of the plate.

An ambulance took her to Laniado Hospital. Tibial plateau fracture, surgery on the second day, a plate and six screws, nine days as an inpatient and another four weeks in her daughter's spare room before she was fit to fly. Her travel policy paid the hospital, which billed at the non resident tariff, and paid for the extra legroom on the flight home. She went back to Melbourne in a boot, on crutches, believing the matter was closed. Israeli accident, Israeli problem, left behind at the airport.

Eleven weeks later her physiotherapist in Melbourne mentioned that a cousin had been paid out after a car accident in Israel. She wrote to us the same week.

The Challenge

The Israeli system is unusually favourable to somebody in her position, and almost nobody in her position knows it exists. The Road Accident Victims Compensation Law 5735-1975 is a no fault statute. An injured person is compensated for bodily injury in a road accident regardless of who caused it, without proving negligence, and residence is irrelevant. A tourist is compensated on the same footing as a resident of Ramat Gan.

The obvious problem was that there was no insurer to claim against, because there was no identified driver. That is what Karnit is for. Section 12 of the Law sets out the cases in which a claim lies against Karnit, the Fund for Compensation of Road Accident Victims, and the identity of the offending vehicle being unknown is one of them, alongside a driver with no valid compulsory insurance and an insurer that has become insolvent. Karnit pays what a normal insurer would have paid. For a visitor struck by a car that drove away, this is the whole difference between a claim and nothing.

Two features of the statute cut the other way and had to be explained to her early, because Australian expectations do not survive contact with them. Section 8 makes the 1975 Law the exclusive remedy for bodily injury in a road accident. Even if the driver had been traced and turned out to have been texting at the wheel, there would be no negligence action against him, and no jury sympathy attaching to his conduct. And the compensation is capped and formula driven rather than open ended. Loss of earnings is limited to three times the national average wage, a ceiling in the region of NIS 40,000 a month, and the damages for pain and suffering are computed by regulation rather than argued.

The practical obstacles were the ordinary ones for a claimant living abroad. Her medical trail after week five was entirely Australian. The neutral medical expert who would fix her disability percentage sits in Israel and examines in person. And there was a piece of evidence she had, without knowing it, that made the file viable: her daughter had called the police from the pavement, and an Israeli police report was opened that night recording an unidentified vehicle failing to stop. Karnit files on hit and run accidents turn on proving that the vehicle could not be traced, and a contemporaneous police report does that work in a way that a statement written eighteen months later in Melbourne never can.

In Practice: Under Section 12 of the Road Accident Victims Compensation Law 5735-1975 a person injured by a vehicle whose identity is unknown claims against Karnit, the Fund for Compensation of Road Accident Victims, which pays on the same basis as a compulsory insurer would under Section 2 of the Motor Vehicle Insurance Ordinance [New Version] 5730-1970. The claim must be brought within 7 years of the accident under Section 5 of the Prescription Law 5718-1958. Karnit's own rules require a written notice setting out the circumstances of the accident and the ground of entitlement, and we filed ours 14 weeks after the accident with the Israel Police report of the night attached, which is the document these files stand or fall on. Her Israeli hospital and ambulance costs alone, billed at the non resident tariff, had already reached NIS 148,000.

What We Did

The first step was a power of attorney, and it had to be done properly from Melbourne rather than improvised. She signed before an Australian notary public, and the notarised instrument was then apostilled by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade at a fee of AUD 102. From that point we could deal with Karnit, the hospital and the court without her.

We then rebuilt the medical file in two halves. The Israeli half came from Laniado: the emergency admission record, the operative note, the imaging and the discharge summary, obtained under the patient's right to the medical information held about her in Section 18 of the Patient's Rights Law 5756-1996. The Australian half was the harder half, because Australian orthopaedic and physiotherapy records are written for clinicians rather than for a foreign court, and they arrive as PDFs with abbreviations nobody in Tel Aviv is obliged to decode. We had the whole set translated by an Israeli notary at NIS 251 for the first 100 words and NIS 197 per further 100, and we asked her Melbourne surgeon for a short structured report addressing range of motion, weight bearing, persistent pain and prognosis, in that order, because that is the shape the Israeli process wants.

We filed the claim at the Magistrates' Court in May 2025, within the jurisdiction of that court under Section 51 of the Courts Law [Consolidated Version] 5744-1984, and served Karnit.

The medical examination was the one thing that could not be done remotely. The court appointed a neutral orthopaedic expert, which is how it works in Israel: the percentage of permanent disability that drives the whole award is fixed by an expert appointed by the court, not by the claimant's own doctors and not by the defendant's. We scheduled the examination for October 2025 to coincide with a trip she had already planned for the grandchild's first birthday, so the file cost her no additional flight. The expert assessed 19 percent permanent orthopaedic disability, with a note on the likelihood of post traumatic arthritis in the knee.

Two Australian issues were run in parallel. Medicare does not pay for treatment received overseas, and there is no social security agreement between Australia and Israel to fall back on, so every shekel of her Israeli treatment came from the travel policy or from her. That policy then asserted a right to be recouped out of any Israeli compensation, which insurers do routinely and which claimants routinely discover at the worst moment. We put the recoupment on the table at the start rather than at the end, and it was resolved with the insurer at AUD 24,000 against an original assertion of AUD 71,000, on the basis that a large part of what it had paid was repatriation and accommodation rather than heads of loss the Israeli claim recovered.

In Practice: Damages for pain and suffering are computed under the Road Accident Victims Compensation (Computation of Compensation for Non Pecuniary Damage) Regulations 5736-1976 rather than argued: a ceiling of about NIS 204,000 at 100 percent disability as at January 2026, multiplied by the disability percentage, reduced by 1 percent for each year of age above 30, plus roughly NIS 400 for each day of hospitalisation. At 19 percent disability, age 58 and nine inpatient days, our client's non pecuniary award came to about NIS 31,500. The neutral court appointed expert who sets that percentage examined her 5 months after the claim was filed, and his report is the hinge of the entire file.

The Outcome

Karnit made its first offer three weeks after the expert's report, at NIS 190,000. It was built on the non pecuniary figure, a token for past loss of earnings and almost nothing for the future, which is the standard opening position when a claimant lives abroad and the defendant is calculating that she will not fly back to fight about it.

We answered on the future loss, which was the real money. She had returned to bookkeeping at reduced hours, could no longer manage the stairs at two of her regular clients, and had given up the site attendance that made up about a third of her billing. Her Australian income evidence, three years of tax returns and a letter from her accountant, was translated and put in alongside the expert's arthritis note. The case settled in June 2026 at NIS 462,000, which broke down as roughly NIS 31,500 for pain and suffering, NIS 96,000 for past loss of earnings, NIS 214,000 for future loss of earning capacity, and the balance for medical, rehabilitation and help expenses in Australia. Payment reached her Melbourne account in August 2026.

She attended no hearing in Israel. She made one trip, for a medical examination scheduled around a birthday she was flying in for anyway.

Key Takeaways

What this case illustrates for visitors injured in Israel:

1. An unidentified driver does not end the claim. Section 12 of the Road Accident Victims Compensation Law 5735-1975 routes a hit and run claim to Karnit, which pays on the same basis as an insurer, and a great many injured tourists never claim because they assume that a car which drove away took their compensation with it.
2. Get the Israeli police report on the night. It is the document that proves the vehicle could not be traced, and it is the difference between a Karnit file that works and one that is fought for two years on whether the accident happened as described.
3. There is no negligence action to hold out for. Section 8 makes the 1975 Law the exclusive remedy for bodily injury in a road accident, so advice from a lawyer at home who is used to suing bad drivers will point in a direction Israeli law has closed.
4. The disability percentage is fixed by a neutral expert appointed by the court, not by your own surgeon. Your treating doctor's report matters as material for that examination and as evidence of prognosis, and it is worth having it written in the structure the Israeli process expects.
5. Deal with your travel insurer's recoupment at the beginning. It will assert a right to be repaid out of the Israeli compensation, and the time to argue about which of its payments actually overlap with the Israeli heads of loss is before you settle, not after. Our guide to road accident compensation for injured tourists in Israel sets out the caps and the exclusions in Section 7 that decide whether a claim exists at all.

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Facing a Similar Situation?

If you were injured in a road accident during a visit to Israel and flew home assuming nothing could be done, the claim survives for seven years and it can be run almost entirely without you.

Contact us for a confidential consultation about your Israeli legal matter.