Shops were open to all on Sunday.

However access to leisure sites like gyms, hotels and theatres was limited to people who have had both doses of the vaccine more than a week prior or recovered from the disease with presumed immunity.

Those people get "Green Pass" status displayed on a government app.

Mask-wearing and social-distancing are still in force. Dancing is barred at banquet halls. Synagogues, mosques and churches are required to halve their normal congregation sizes.

Coming exactly a year after Israel's first documented coronavirus case, Sunday's easing of curbs was part of a government plan to open the economy more widely next month, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is up for re-election.

"We are the first country in the world that is reviving itself thanks to the millions of vaccines we brought in," he tweeted. "Vaccinated? Get the Green Pass and get back to life."

Israel has administered at least one dose of the Pfizer Inc vaccine to more than 46 per cent of its 9 million population, the health ministry says.

The risk of illness from COVID-19 had dropped 95.8 per cent among people who received both shots of the vaccine, it said on Saturday.

The country has logged more than 740,000 cases and 5500 deaths from the illness, prompting criticism of the Netanyahu government's sometimes patchy enforcement of three national lockdowns.

It has pledged there will not be a fourth.

But Nachman Ash, a physician in charge of the country's pandemic response, told Army Radio another lockdown "is still possible ... Half of the population is still not immune."

Elementary school children and pupils in the last two years of high school attended classes on Sunday in Israeli towns found to have contagion rates under control.

Middle schoolers are due back by next month, after almost a year of remote learning.

Australian Associated Press