The Jewish population in Judea and Samaria grew in 2025 at twice the rate of Israel’s overall population, according to a report compiled by former lawmaker Ya’akov Katz and first shared with JNS on Friday.
As of Jan. 1, 2026, 541,085 Jews lived in Judea, Samaria and the Jordan Valley, amounting to some 5.32% of the total population of the Jewish state, according to the West Bank Jewish Population Stats Report.
The population grew by 2.2% last year, exactly double the 1.1% growth rate of the nation’s overall population.
That figure, culled from Interior Ministry statistics, does not include the some 340,000 Jews living in the eastern part of Jerusalem, which the Palestinians claim despite it being part of Israel’s capital, the report noted.
Despite that, it showed a slight slowdown in growth in Judea and Samaria, which Katz attributed to the aging population.
Bet El, in the Binyamin region of southern Samaria, for example, had the country’s highest birth rate in 1986, when most of its residents were of childbearing age. Four decades later, many residents there and across Judea and Samaria are in their 60s and 70s, moderating growth.
The Jewish population in Judea and Samaria has grown 13.8% since 2021, when 475,481 Jews lived in the region liberated during the 1967 Six-Day War.
Some of the fastest-growing communities over the past year were Avigail and Asael in the South Hebron Hills in Judea, which recorded growth of 720% and 644.8%, respectively, Shacharit in Samaria (600%), Givat HaRoeh in Binyamin (169.4%) and Beit Hogla in the Jordan Valley (111.6%).
The largest localities were the Haredi cities of Modi’in Illit (in Samaria) and Beitar Illit (in Judea), with 92,339 and 74,760 residents, respectively, followed by the Judean Desert city of Ma’ale Adumim outside Jerusalem (40,800); Giv’at Ze’ev, also near the capital (25,630); and the Samaria city of Ariel (22,273).
