El Al planes are seen on the tarmac at Ben-Gurion International airport, near Tel Aviv, Israel, March 10, 2020. Photo: Reuters / Ronen Zvulun.

Some 333,500 tourists visited Israel in October 2022, the country’s Central Bureau of Statistics announced on Sunday, the greatest amount recorded since February 2020, when tourism ground to a halt with the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic and associated travel restrictions.

The figure represents a 485 percent increase from the number of tourists who visited Israel in October 2021. It is also only a 25 percent decline from the 447,100 tourists welcomed in the same month in 2019, a year that saw a record number of tourists visit Israel, surpassing earlier highs set in both 2018 and 2017.

The Jewish state lifted restrictions barring entry to foreigners who did not receive a Covid-19 vaccine this March, two years after it first closed its borders at the outset of the pandemic. Since late May, travelers are also no longer required to take a Covid-19 PCR test after arriving at Ben Gurion Airport or to show a negative test result before taking off to Israel.

Yet overall visitor numbers are still significantly depressed compared to record pre-pandemic levels. Some 2,078,000 tourists arrived this year between January and October, a 45 percent decrease from the 3,742,100 tourists seen in the same period in 2019.

While some 50 percent of the tourists who came to Israel this year so far hailed from Europe, the United States alone supplied some 649,300 visitors, more than any other country. France followed in second place with 192,500 visitors and the United Kingdom came in third with 146,800.

Israel’s Tourism Ministry is currently expecting the calendar year to close out with some 2.4 to 2.6 million arrivals. The latest figures, it said, “point to a continuation of the recovery trend of incoming tourism to Israel.”