Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

General Strike Briefly Shuts Down Israel

A general strike by Israel’s public sector ended on Monday after four hours of near paralysis across in the economy.

The strike took place from 6:00 A.M. to 10 A.M., after Labor Court President Nili Arad decided after a night of deliberations to limit it to only four hours.

The strike included trains, buses, universities, government ministries and municipalities. Israel’s Ben Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv was also closed.

Due to the strike, many Israelis prepared accordingly and opted to take other modes of transportation rather than trains and buses, causing massive traffic jams.

Israeli airline El Al decided to reschedule all of its flights to Sunday night, so most people were able to fly out of Israel before the strike took effect.

The Labor Court finished its deliberations in the early morning hours, but sent off its decision limiting the duration of the strike only after the strike began. The deliberations took over five hours, after talks between Ofer Eini, head of the Histadrut Labor Federation and Finance Minister Steinitz ended without a breakthrough.

The Histadrut, the umbrella organization for hundreds of thousands of public sector workers, wants the government to hire some 250,000 contract workers, who have working conditions that are inferior to those of civil workers that are directly on government payrolls.

For more, go to []Haaretz.com](http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/israel-s-general-strike-ends-after-four-hours-of-disruptions-1.394171 “]Haaretz.com”)

A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism so that we can be prepared for whatever news 2025 brings.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:

  • Credit the Forward
  • Retain our pixel
  • Preserve our canonical link in Google search
  • Add a noindex tag in Google search

See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.