An Israeli woman has mistakenly thrown away a mattress worth a million dollars.

The woman said she bought a new mattress for a present for her elderly mother.

She didn't think anything about throwing away the old one.

But the next day, the mother remembered that she had stashed away her life savings inside that mattress.

And now a frantic search is underway for it across several landfills in Israel.

"Yesterday morning, a woman called. She was crying and she said she lost all of her savings in a mattress that she threw out to the street and the mattress has apparently been cleared, someone took it and it might have reached one of the rubbish dumps," said Shaul Yogev, manager of Rubbish Dump.

The woman said she kept the money there because of past traumatic experiences with banks.