Israel Tests a Second Traveller From Congo for Ebola

Israel’s Ministry of Health said it had received a report of a second person in the country suspected of being infected with the Ebola virus after returning from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The person had come back to Israel two days earlier and sought medical attention after developing a fever, a headache and diarrhoea.

At that stage it was a suspicion only, the ministry said, and the necessary tests were being carried out, with results expected within days. The patient was being treated in isolation under the professional procedures set for high-risk infectious diseases and was being transferred to Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer, near Tel Aviv, which is one of the hospitals designated to receive cases of this kind.

The outbreak the traveller had returned from

The Democratic Republic of the Congo was in the middle of a major Ebola emergency at the time. On 17 May 2026 the World Health Organization determined that an epidemic of Ebola disease caused by the Bundibugyo virus in the DRC and Uganda amounted to a public health emergency of international concern, its highest formal alarm, the WHO announced at the time, citing eight laboratory-confirmed cases, 246 suspected cases and 80 suspected deaths in Ituri province as of 16 May, plus two laboratory-confirmed cases in Kampala, Uganda.

Bundibugyo is one of the Ebola species for which there is no licensed vaccine and no specific treatment, although trials of candidates were under way and the WHO had added a first diagnostic test to its emergency use listing by early July 2026, according to the WHO’s outbreak page. That is a meaningful difference from the better-known Zaire species, against which a licensed vaccine exists. The outbreak went on to become, as of 7 August 2026, the second-largest Ebola outbreak on record, passing 1,000 confirmed cases within 40 days, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said, a scale reached after this Israeli case was reported.

Why a suspected case is not a case

Fever, headache and diarrhoea are the opening symptoms of Ebola disease and also of a long list of far more common illnesses, which is why returning travellers from an affected region are isolated and tested rather than diagnosed. Israel’s health ministry stressed that the person had not been confirmed as having the disease and that Ebola is not airborne, spreading instead through direct contact with a symptomatic person or with blood, body fluids or secretions, the Times of Israel reported on 21 June 2026. The same report noted that Israel has never recorded a confirmed case of Ebola, and that several suspected cases during the 2014 West African outbreak tested negative.

Why Sheba, and what isolation means

Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer is one of a small number of Israeli hospitals designated to receive suspected high-risk infectious disease patients. The designation matters because handling a possible viral haemorrhagic fever requires dedicated isolation rooms, trained staff in full protective equipment and laboratory arrangements that ordinary emergency departments do not maintain. Two days before this announcement, according to the same reporting, the ministry said a different man had been sent for testing at Rambam Medical Center in Haifa after a recent trip to the DRC.

What is still unclear

The ministry did not release the person’s name, age or sex, did not say where in the DRC they had travelled or why, and gave no timetable more precise than “the coming days” for the test results. It did not describe contact tracing, or say whether fellow passengers or household members were being monitored. It also did not report the outcome of the first suspected case.