Rehovot

Rehovot is a city in the Central District of Israel, roughly twenty kilometers south of Tel Aviv on the country's coastal plain. It began in 1890 as a moshava, an agricultural settlement founded by Jewish pioneers of the First Aliyah who bought land near an estate known as Khirbat Deiran, and over the following decades it grew around citrus farming, a railway station and agricultural research. The city is best known today as a center of science and technology: it hosts the Weizmann Institute of Science and the agricultural faculty of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the Tamar Science Park on its northern edge supports high-tech firms. Its population was counted at 155,049 in 2024, making it one of the larger cities of central Israel, and its fabric includes older quarters laid out along Yaakov and Benjamin Streets as well as suburbs that grew on lands once belonging to the village of Zarnuqa.