Despite recent terror bombings and rockets launched from Gaza, Israel is ranked as one of the safest countries for visitors, according to travel website The Swiftest.
Israel was ranked as the 5th-safest country in the world to visit, just behind Singapore, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Switzerland.
According to The Swiftest’s scoring system, Israel is safer for tourists than the U.S., the UK and Japan.
The site compared the world’s top 50 countries for tourism and used metrics such as the murder rate, road traffic deaths, natural disaster risk, and deaths from unsanitary conditions in order to give each country a score.
Data on those risk rates was pulled from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, World Health Organization, and World Bank.
The least-safe countries in the world for tourism were listed as South Africa, India, Dominican Republic, Mexico and Brazil.
Countries received a grade, from A (excellent) to F (very poor) in a number of categories, along with an overall letter grade score summarizing the general safety situation of the country.
Israel earned an overall score of A for tourist safety, while the U.S. trailed behind with a C minus score.
The U.S.’ score was lowered by an F in the murder rate category, due to a high number of per capita homicides.
The U.S. State Department has a medium risk-level travel warning for Israel.
“Terrorist groups, lone-wolf terrorists and other violent extremists continue plotting possible attacks in Israel,” reads the warning on the U.S. site.
“Terrorists and violent extremists may attack with little or no warning, targeting tourist locations, transportation hubs, markets/shopping malls, and local government facilities. Violence can occur in Israel … without warning.”
According to recently released figures from the Tourism Ministry, some 2 million tourists visited Israel between January and October 2022.
The Ministry expects that 2.5 million people will have visited Israel by the end of the year after nearly two years of a pandemic-induced blanket ban on non-citizens, which devastated the local tourism industry.
In 2019, Israel reached an all-time tourism high of 4.5 million visitors.
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