As someone who just did this for 3 pax in peak season, I'm going to agree with craz and then just give you a general rule about award flying which is extremely relevant to TLV:
You have to have some flexibility in your travels. The greater the flexibility, the easier it is to get flights..

If you want 40k Saver tickets on UA direct r/t to TLV, then you need to travel in dead months, or play roulette and see if something opens up the day before you want to fly. Otherwise, you need to connect through Europe. If these neighbors are willing to connect, the options will open up, even in summer. (routings I've seen recently 40k booked on UA for summer - JFK-YYZ-TLV, JFK-ZRH-TLV, EWR-FRA-TLV, etc).

If they can fly separately that will probably help.

Finally to the points part:
they need at LEAST 200k points (for 5 pax in saver Y on UA, say) in each direction, for a total of 400k.
That's a major churn going on for each of them. It's not a problem, but at that volume of points it's not really YOUR problem. Turn them on to FT and consider your job done.

If you're a masochist and still want to help them:
AA points can be used to book El Al, and there are 50k citi offers around. If you can convince these people to be more flexible then AA points are great (use them to fly on IB, RJ, BA, and probably others I am forgetting).
Chase have Avios, United, Ultimate Rewards, all usable to get to TLV (without commenting on the worth of Avios)
Amex work with Delta, which can get you to TLV on DL, AF, AZ or KLM.

If you're really adventurous you could look for cheap paid positioning flights to Europe and then fly on points from there - it would still cut the price of a flight in half, for 5 people that adds up, especially in summer.

Good luck.