Road Accident Compensation for Tourists Injured in Israel

A couple from Manchester is crossing a road in Tel Aviv on the second day of their trip when a car turns into them. An American family's rental car is rear-ended on Route 1. A visitor steps off a bus awkwardly when it brakes hard and tears a knee. In each case the injured person flies home within days or weeks, assumes an Israeli accident is an Israeli problem they have left behind, and never claims. That assumption quietly forfeits compensation that Israeli law was designed to give them, and the design is unusually favourable to the injured, tourist or not.

Israel runs a no-fault system for road accidents, which surprises visitors from countries where you must prove the other driver was to blame. Here the starting point is different: if you were hurt in a road accident, you are compensated, and the fight over who caused it largely falls away. What follows is how that system treats someone who does not live in Israel, and where the real obstacles sit, which is almost never where visitors expect. If you were treated in an Israeli hospital first, our guide to emergency medical treatment for non-residents covers that immediate stage.

No Fault Means What It Says

The governing statute is the Road Accident Victims Compensation Law 1975, known in Hebrew as Pitzuyim LeNifga'ei Te'unot Drachim, and its central idea is simple.

A person injured in a road accident is entitled to compensation regardless of who was at fault. You do not have to prove the other driver was negligent, and your own carelessness does not, by itself, defeat the claim. Every vehicle on an Israeli road must carry compulsory bodily-injury insurance, the bituach chova, under the Motor Vehicle Insurance Ordinance, and that insurance is what pays. A pedestrian claims against the insurer of the car that struck them. A passenger, including a tourist in a taxi, a bus, or a friend's car, claims against the insurer of the vehicle they were in. A tourist driving a rental car claims against the rental vehicle's chova policy.

There are real exceptions, and they are worth knowing before you assume you are covered. Section 7 of the Law denies compensation to a driver who was unlicensed, who drove a vehicle they knew had no valid insurance, who took the vehicle without permission, or who caused the accident deliberately. For an ordinary injured visitor none of these usually apply, but a tourist who drives on an expired or non-convertible foreign licence can walk straight into the licence exclusion, which is one reason our guide to driving in Israel as a non-resident matters more than it looks.

When the Other Vehicle Is Uninsured or Gone

No-fault protection would be hollow if it collapsed whenever the responsible vehicle could not be found or had no cover. The Law closes that gap.

Karnit, the Fund for Compensation of Road Accident Victims, is a statutory body that steps into the shoes of a missing insurer. If you were struck by a hit-and-run driver who was never identified, or by a vehicle whose insurance had lapsed, or if the insurer has become insolvent, your claim goes to Karnit instead of to an insurance company, and Karnit pays what a normal insurer would have paid. For a tourist this is often the difference between a claim and nothing at all, because the alternative, chasing an unidentified Israeli driver from another country, is hopeless.

In Practice: Under the Road Accident Victims Compensation Law 1975, a tourist hit by an unidentified or uninsured vehicle claims against Karnit, the Fund for Compensation of Road Accident Victims, which pays on the same basis as an insurer. Loss of earnings is calculated on the injured person's actual income but capped at three times the national average wage, a ceiling in the region of NIS 40,000 a month in 2025. The claim must be brought within seven years of the accident, and because Karnit files often turn on proving the vehicle could not be traced, a contemporaneous Israeli police report is worth far more than a memory reconstructed two years later abroad.

What the Compensation Actually Covers, and Its Limits

No-fault compensation is generous in its certainty but bounded in its amount, and a visitor used to open-ended American-style damages should calibrate expectations.

The heads of loss follow ordinary personal-injury logic: past and future loss of earnings, medical and rehabilitation expenses, help and care, and non-pecuniary damages for pain and suffering. But the 1975 Law caps them. Loss of earnings is limited to three times the average wage, so a very high earner is not made whole for their full salary. Pain-and-suffering damages are not left to a jury's sympathy; they are fixed by a statutory formula tied to the degree of medical disability, the days of hospitalisation, and age. The result is predictable, which helps settlement, but it is not a lottery win.

The single most important limit is procedural rather than financial. Section 8 makes this Law the exclusive remedy for bodily injury in a road accident, which means you cannot decline the no-fault route and instead sue the driver for negligence in the hope of a larger award. The statutory scheme is the only door.

Common Mistake: A seriously injured visitor, advised by a lawyer at home who is used to fault-based systems, holds out for a negligence claim against the "reckless" Israeli driver and treats the insurer's no-fault offer as an insult to be beaten in court. Section 8 forecloses that entirely, there is no separate negligence action for a road accident, and the months spent posturing burn through the seven-year window and the medical trail. The realistic path was always to maximise the statutory claim, where the leverage is the disability percentage set by the court expert, not the driver's blameworthiness.

The Real Obstacle for a Non-Resident: Proving the Injury

Liability is rarely the battleground in these cases. The degree of disability is, and this is where distance hurts most.

Israeli courts do not simply accept your own doctors' opinions. The degree of medical disability, which drives most of the compensation, is set by a neutral medical expert (mumche) appointed by the court, sometimes one per relevant specialty. Your home-country hospital records, imaging, and specialist reports are important evidence that the expert weighs, but they have to be apostilled and translated, and they inform the Israeli assessment rather than replacing it. A claimant living abroad therefore needs to preserve every medical document from the moment of the accident onward, keep proof of income for the loss-of-earnings calculation, and be ready to attend a single Israeli medical examination if the expert requires one, which an attorney can often schedule around a planned visit.

In Practice: Section 2 of the Motor Vehicle Insurance Ordinance [New Version] 5730-1970 requires every vehicle to carry bituach chova covering bodily injury to the driver, the passengers, and any pedestrian struck, so an injured tourist claims with no excess to pay out of pocket. The degree of disability that drives the award is fixed by a neutral court-appointed expert (mumche), not by the claimant's own doctors, and that examination is usually scheduled within a few months of filing at the Magistrates' or District Court. On a moderate injury assessed at around 10% disability, the compensation commonly reaches into the tens of thousands of shekels once capped loss of earnings and the statutory pain-and-suffering formula are combined.

There is one practical mercy. Advocates' fees in road-accident cases are capped by law rather than left to open negotiation, so a foreign claimant is protected from the very high contingency percentages common elsewhere, and can pursue a claim without funding it out of pocket up front.

Running the Claim From Another Country

Everything above assumes you can act across a distance and a time zone, and the mechanics are routine once set up.

You appoint an Israeli personal-injury attorney under a power of attorney signed before a notary and apostilled in your home country, and from that point the lawyer deals with the insurer or Karnit, files any court claim, and manages the medical-expert process. Your home health insurer or travel-insurance policy may have paid your initial treatment and may have its own right to be reimbursed from the Israeli compensation, so those policies need to be read alongside the claim rather than ignored. Israel's public health system and kupot cholim do not cover a tourist, so the Israeli compensation, and any travel policy, is usually where your medical costs land; our overview of health insurance in Israel for non-residents explains why a visitor sits outside the national scheme.

Practical Checklist

• Get an Israeli police report at the scene or as soon as possible, especially if the other vehicle left or may be uninsured, because a Karnit claim can turn on it.
• Keep every medical record from Israel and from home, and preserve proof of your income for the loss-of-earnings calculation.
• Do not sign a quick settlement or release with an insurer before an Israeli lawyer has valued the claim against the statutory heads of loss.
• Remember that you cannot sue in negligence instead; the 1975 Law is the only route, so focus on the disability assessment.
• Note the seven-year limit, but treat the first months as the real window while evidence is fresh.
• Check whether your travel or home health insurer has already paid and may claim reimbursement from the Israeli compensation.

Speak With an Israeli Attorney

A road accident on a trip to Israel does not stay behind when your flight home takes off, and the no-fault system is built to compensate you even though you live abroad, provided the claim is preserved and the medical assessment is handled through the Israeli process. We deal with the insurer or Karnit, manage the court-appointed expert, and pursue the claim so you do not have to keep flying back.

Contact us for a confidential initial consultation.