Immigration is at its lowest since the 1980s, with 18,129 olim arriving in Israel since last Rosh Hashana, according to a Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) report released Wednesday. 151,679 babies were born in Israel in 2007, a 2.4% increase in relation to the figure in 2006. The average Israeli woman gives birth to 2.9 babies in her lifetime, with the first child coming, on average, at the age of 27. Israel's total population stands at 7,337,000, the report concluded, with 151,000 babies being born last year, up 2.5% from the previous year. 5,542,000 Israelis are Jewish, 1,477,000 are Arab, and 318,000 were listed as "others," most of them olim who had not registered as Jews in the census. The data, published ahead of the high holidays, also showed that Muslim population growth in Israel was nearly three percent, with the figure standing at 1.5% among Jews. In the past few years, however, there has been a significant decline in the growth rate of Israel's Muslim sector, which stood at 3.8% in 2000. The overall population growth rate in 2007 was 1.8%, a similar figure to recent years and reminiscent of the 1980s, when aliya to Israel was not as high as in the 1990s. The CBS report found that half of Israel's Jews live in the Center, with only 10% of the Jewish population opting to reside in the North. The percentage of Israelis under the age of 14 was 28.4%, significantly higher than in the rest of the Western world, where youths make up only 17 percent of the population. 44,685 couples tied the knot in 2006, 33,800 of them Jewish, while 13,439 couples were divorced. The median marriage age in 2006 was 27.3 for men and 24.2 from women, up from 26.2 and 23.4 for men and women, respectively, in 1999. The percentage of singles among Israel's 20-somethings has risen in the past eight years, the data showed. In 2006, 76 percent of men between the ages of 20 and 29 were single, up three percentage points since 2000. Single women comprised 60% of the corresponding age group in 2006, a staggering 6 percent more than in 2000.
