About 2% of Israelis are Christians, and the community is expected to continue to grow at an annual rate of over 1%, official statistics released Thursday ahead of Christmas show.
About 190,000 Christians live in Israel, reflecting a 1.3% increase in 2022.
Seventy-five percent of the Christians in Israel are Arabs.
The average age of Christians at first marriage was 30 for grooms and 27 for brides, higher than among members of the other religions for both grooms and brides. In 2022, the fertility rate for Christian women in Israel—the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime—was 1.68.
Israel’s population will pass 10 million in 2024, according to data the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) published in September ahead of Rosh Hashanah.
The Jewish state has a population of approximately 9.795 million people, the report said. Some 7.181 million (73%) identify as Jewish, 2.065 million (21%) as Arab and 549,000 (5%) as neither.
The country’s population will reach 10 million by late 2024 and 16 million by 2048, the CBS said. By 2065, Israel’s population is expected to have doubled.