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Abstract
The Mediterranean Sea has undergone extreme changes over the last 30 million years, finally becoming a part of the Tethys enclosed within an internal basin and frequently opening into the Atlantic Ocean and the northern Red Sea. These events left behind them faunal elements from the respective oceans, which mixed with autochthonous species. The opening of the Suez Canal 138 years ago led to a renewed influx of Red Sea species that established themselves along the littoral, especially in the Levant region, and formed the mixed Red‐Mediterranean Seas communities. This study summarises data on species composition of benthic animal assemblages encountered along the Israeli Mediterranean littoral and sublittoral. The described assemblages are identified and named according to the leading taxa, separately for hard and soft substrata. Of over 500 taxa listed in this study, 60 species are of Red Sea or Indo‐Pacific origin, among them the largest in their respective communities. Compared with faunal descriptions of the Israeli Mediterranean Sea benthos from the 1970s, two phenomena are now prominent: an increase of Red Sea immigrant species, and a drastic decline of biodiversity and species richness in several polluted sites, induced by anthropogenic stress. Occurrence of imposexes, pathological phenomena in population structures and abnormal cytology of selected taxa that disrupts the genetic uniformity accompany these changes.