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About a third of people who receive unemployment checks in Israel don’t want to work again, the government data says. Many of them are happy to continue living off benefits even as the economy is reopening.
Around 20,000 people, which is nearly 30% of workers currently living off unemployment benefits, are refusing to return to work, the data from the Central Bureau of Statistics show.
Roughly 64% of those refusing to work again say they prefer to keep receiving unemployment checks.
Hundreds of thousands were forced to stop working due to extremely tough quarantine measures, with the number of unemployed rising to 560,000 shortly after a third nationwide lockdown came into effect in late December. The lockdown was eventually eased as the immunization campaign kicked in.