Israel is building a NIS 7b. airport – history says it will cost much more - analysis

The data regarding the establishment of a new Negev airport was impressive: NIS 7 billion; 10 million passengers a year; 70,000 aircraft movements; and a “national necessity” that would “effectively eliminate the concept of periphery,” according to the Prime Minister’s Office.

A cabinet vote was then scheduled for February 8. But it was postponed less than an hour before the session amid disagreements over whether to include a parallel airport at Ramat David in the Jezreel Valley.

The government’s confidence would be reassuring if not for one problem: Israel has not completed a single major government-funded infrastructure project on time and on budget in the past two decades. Not one.

The Tel Aviv Red Line Light Rail was approved in 2010 at NIS 10.7 b. It opened in August 2023 at NIS 18.71 b. – 75% over budget and a full decade late. The state comptroller found that the original budget allocated just 16% to contingencies, compared with the international standard of roughly 50%.

Budget changes worth hundreds of millions of shekels went undocumented. The NTA Metropolitan Mass Transit System diverted funds between line items to create the appearance of operating within budget.

The Jerusalem Light Rail was estimated at NIS 2.2 b. around 2002. The final cost reached NIS 3.8 b. – a 73% overrun. The line opened in December 2011, five to seven years behind schedule. In 2020, the government paid NIS 1.6 b. to buy back the failed CityPass concession.

As for the Green Line, which was supposed to open by 2020, it will not become fully operational until 2030 at the earliest, with NTA’s own CEO, Tamar Ben Meir, describing even that target as “ambitious.”

The state comptroller found that the construction pace on these lines was 48% slower than international norms.

These are not cherry-picked failures. A Calcalist study found that the average budget overrun for Israeli infrastructure projects exceeds 20%, with large government bodies responsible for 62% of all overruns. For major rail and transit, the median overrun exceeds 70%.

The pattern is structural and has been documented extensively by the state comptroller and corroborated by global academic research.

Bent Flyvbjerg, an Oxford professor who assembled the world’s largest database on megaproject performance – more than 16,000 projects across 136 countries – found that 91.5% of megaprojects exceed the budget, over schedule, or both.

The mean cost overrun globally is 62%. For rail projects, it is 44.7%. The core mechanism is what Flyvbjerg called “strategic misrepresentation”: initial budgets are deliberately set low because stating the real cost would make the project politically unpalatable.

A November 2022 comptroller’s report – the most authoritative document on the subject – found that NTA diverted budgets between sections to mask overruns, that changes worth hundreds of millions of shekels went unreported to the Transportation and Finance ministries, and that the government failed to set binding completion dates.

Israel is not an outlier. It is a textbook case, one that happens to perform worse than the global average.

One Israeli project provides a direct comparison to Ziklag: Eilat’s Ramon Airport.

Government authorization for it was granted in July 2011 for NIS 1.6 b. The airport opened in January 2019 – 21 months late – at a reported NIS 1.7 b., though total investment approached NIS 2 b. when all-in costs were included.

The cost overrun was modest by Israeli standards. However, data published by the Israel Airports Authority indicates that in 2025, of the 750,000 total passengers, only around 7,500 were international.

That is almost NIS 2 b. invested in what has been described as a “white elephant.” Ramon Airport was designed to accommodate 2.5m. passengers per year. In practice, it functions primarily as a domestic shuttle point for Arkia and Israir.

Ziklag is being sold on the same premise: build it in the periphery and the passengers will come. The estimated cost is more than three times higher.

The Ziklag decision was not made based on professional advice. It was made against it.

For years, the debate centered on two alternatives: Ramat David in the Jezreel Valley, where a master plan was approved as early as 2007, and Nevatim in the Negev, adjacent to an existing air force base. The National Planning and Building Council had been advancing Ramat David since 2017.

Then, last June, Netanyahu announced the airport would be built at Ziklag – a third site that neither the planning nor the defense establishments had recommended.

The Defense Ministry imposed what Calcalist described as an “absolute veto” on airports in the South. The IDF and air force argued that civilian flight paths would interfere with training and operational sorties from the air bases of Nevatim and Hatzerim, and that relocating squadrons would cost an estimated NIS 15 b.

Planning authorities determined eight years ago that Ziklag’s flight paths overlapped with the ones used by Ben-Gurion Airport, meaning the new airport would add to congestion rather than relieve it.

Industry sources told TheMarker the decision was politically driven mainly by Transportation Minister Miri Regev, who wanted a southern airport “apparently at any cost, even if the professional considerations do not support the plan.”

Aviation officials separately told Haaretz the move was driven by political pressure from Likud officials in the South.

The Negev Takes Off from Nevatim group – a coalition of local authority heads, including Dimona Mayor Benny Biton, a Likud figure close to both Regev and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – called the Ziklag decision “disconnected from reality and absurd by any measure.”

They argued that Nevatim already had billions invested in airport infrastructure and that new planning at Ziklag would take at least a decade, producing no immediate solution to Ben-Gurion Airport’s capacity problem.

In two decades, precisely two categories of Israeli projects have been completed on time and on budget: desalination plants and the National Library of Israel.

The National Library opened in October 2023, with a budget of NIS 845m. The decisive factor: 86% of funding came from private donors who imposed strict professional oversight. Only 14% was government money.

So: same country, regulatory environment, and labor market. The variable was who bore the risk and who managed the project. Ziklag has neither private risk-sharing nor independent oversight. It is a fully government-managed project on public funds.

If the Israeli median overrun of 50% to 75% applies – conservative, given that several projects have exceeded 100% – the realistic cost range is NIS 10.5 to 12.25 b.

The government has not stated a completion date. Critics estimate at least a decade. Given that the Israeli median delay runs five to 10 years beyond stated targets, the mid-2040s is more realistic for completion than the mid-2030s.

The Ziklag airport will also be competing for scarce resources. The December 2025 comptroller’s report on the Tel Aviv Metro – a project whose cost had already risen from NIS 150 b. to NIS 177 b. – found the Metro Authority had no permanent director and only five employees. Israel faces a shortage of 4,500 civil engineers, expected to grow to 8,000.

Seven km. from the proposed airport site, furthermore, is where Hamas terrorists carried out the October 7 massacre.

The government has approved NIS 7 b. for an airport that professional planners did not recommend, in a location the military opposes, on a site that lacks infrastructure, with overlapping airspace, without a stated completion date, without private risk-sharing, and without the oversight that characterizes the only Israeli projects ever completed on budget.

If the data is any guide, and 20 years of it suggests it is, the final price tag will not be NIS 7 b.