Our UK company employs one person in Israel and we want to let her go. Can we just give notice the way we would in London?

The first thing a British employer notices about Israeli employment law is that there is no probationary safe harbour and no equivalent of the two-year qualifying period. The second thing, usually discovered in a claim form, is that the decision to dismiss must be made after hearing the employee rather than communicated to them once it has been made.

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Detailed Answer

Three separate obligations run at once. The shimua is the first and it is judge-made rather than statutory, which is why foreign employers reading the statute book miss it entirely. The employee must receive a written invitation naming the actual grounds under consideration, specific enough to answer, and generic formulas such as loss of confidence or unsatisfactory performance are routinely held insufficient. She needs a reasonable period to prepare, usually several days, the right to be accompanied, and a hearing conducted by someone who has not already decided. Minutes should be kept and the decision issued afterwards, not on the same call. The second obligation is notice. The Advance Notice for Dismissal and Resignation Law 5761-2001 requires written notice stating both the date it was given and the date employment ends, and sets a sliding scale: one day per month during the first six months, six days plus two and a half days per further month between the seventh month and the end of the first year, and a full month for a monthly-paid employee thereafter. The third is severance. Section 1 of the Severance Pay Law 5723-1963 entitles an employee dismissed after a year of continuous service to one month's salary for each year, with a proportionate amount for part years after the first, and in most Israeli arrangements the bulk of this has already been funded through the pension policy. Layered on top are absolute bars. Section 9 of the Women's Employment Law 5714-1954 prohibits dismissing a pregnant employee with six months' service without a permit from the supervisor at the Ministry of Labour, and protection continues for 60 days after maternity and parental leave ends.

Being outside Israel changes the mechanics and not the standard. The Regional Labour Court will hear a claim about work performed in Israel even where the employer is a company registered in England with no Israeli entity, and the fact that the hearing was held on a video call is not itself a defect. What foreign employers get wrong is treating the shimua as a formality staged after the decision, and the Labour Court reads the internal emails that prove it. Two practical habits close most of the exposure. Conduct the hearing in Hebrew or with an interpreter and record that the employee was offered one, because a claim that she could not properly present her case in a second language is easy to make and awkward to rebut. And take the local advice before the invitation letter goes out rather than after, since the letter itself is the document the court examines most closely. Structure matters too: employers using a local intermediary should check who is formally the employer for these purposes, a point developed in our answer on hiring staff in Israel through an employer of record, and the tax treatment of the eventual payout is set out in our answer on Israeli severance pay tax for a non-resident employee.

In Practice: The Advance Notice for Dismissal and Resignation Law 5761-2001 requires written notice reaching one month for a monthly-paid employee after a year, and Section 1 of the Severance Pay Law 5723-1963 gives one month's salary per year of service, so an employee on NIS 25,000 a month with four years' service is owed roughly NIS 100,000 in severance plus a month's notice. Section 9 of the Women's Employment Law 5714-1954 requires a permit from the supervisor at the Ministry of Labour to dismiss a pregnant employee with six months' service, and that application typically takes 4 to 10 weeks. Where a dismissal is found to have skipped a genuine shimua, the Regional Labour Court commonly awards NIS 20,000 to NIS 80,000 on top of the statutory entitlements, and a contested claim runs 12 to 24 months.

When to Consult a Lawyer

• The employee is pregnant, on parental leave, within 60 days of returning, on reserve duty or has recently raised a complaint, since each of these converts an ordinary dismissal into one that is either prohibited or presumptively unlawful
• You intend to rely on performance grounds that were never documented, because the Labour Court treats a first written complaint that appears in the hearing invitation as evidence the decision preceded the process
• The employment was structured through a contractor arrangement or a foreign payroll, where the court may find an employment relationship existed all along and add years of unpaid social benefits to the severance calculation

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Speak With an Israeli Attorney

An Israeli employment lawyer drafts the hearing invitation, runs the shimua properly from abroad, calculates notice and severance correctly, and identifies any statutory bar before the decision is announced.

Contact us for a confidential initial consultation.