Some 300 Supreme Court cases - 4.5 percent of the court's total caseload - are more than five years old, according to statistics posted on the court system's web site.

The data on cases pending before the Supreme Court will be updated monthly at www.court.gov.il, as part of the court system's efforts to reach full transparency. The statistics are displayed according to the type of case - criminal, civil, High Court, or administrative - the age of the case, and where it is in the court procedure: waiting for a court date, waiting for summations, waiting for a decision or waiting for the reading of the verdict.

The information, which appears only in Hebrew under the spokesman's link inside the site, indicates that each justice has a backlog of some 500 cases, but the workload is three times that for each justice, since most Supreme Court cases are heard by at least three justices.

There has been progress in reducing the case load, however. According to the data on the site, while the court has received 2,532 cases since the beginning of the year, it has closed 3,037, for a net 500 case reduction in the backlog. The overall backlog is now at 4,264 cases, of which 77 percent were opened in the past two years.