Intifada has cost Israel $2.4 billion, mainly in tourism

The intifada, which began in at the start of October 2000, has cost Israel $2.4 billion in revenue for the period October 2000 to December 2001. The main cause for the losses is the $2.1 billion decrease in revenue from tourism.

There was a 52 percent drop in the number of tourists visiting Israel between September 2001 and January 2002, as compared to the year before. From September 2001 to December 2001, following the September 11 attacks, the number of tourists who visited Israel declined to 33 percent of the number for the same period in 1999.

A report issued by the Bank of Israel's monitoring department, included in the "2001 Bank of Israel report," shows that between October 2000 and December 2001, wage costs for Palestinian workers declined by $1.1 billion. At the end of 2001, practically no money was spent on salaries for Palestinian workers in Israel. This decline was partially countered by $380 million in wage costs to foreign workers.

The number of Palestinian workers has dropped from an average of 124,000 in the third quarter of 2000, to only 4,000 in the last two quarters of 2001.