Over the past two years, the Israeli Knesset has passed dozens of new laws, the cumulative effect of which is to further entrench and deepen Israel’s regime of apartheid and repression over all Palestinians under its control – both in Israel and in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT). Adalah’s new report, “Post-7 October: A New Wave of Anti-Palestinian Israeli Laws”, reviews key legislation passed between 7 October 2023 and 27 July 2025. The laws span multiple themes, including freedom of expression, protest, and thought; the right to citizenship and family life; equality and social rights; and the rights of detainees and prisoners. These new laws fundamentally violate the human rights of Palestinians.
While the state has legitimized these new laws by the wartime political climate, this legislation is rooted in Israel’s constitutional structure based on Jewish ethno-national supremacy, which in many instances, amounts to separate legal systems for Jewish Israelis and Palestinians. The laws reflect and are the manifestation of the 2018 Basic Law: Jewish Nation State; as this new government declared in its guiding principles, “the Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right over all areas of the Land of Israel.” Since 7 October 2023, Israeli authorities have used the war to accelerate these trends and consolidate Jewish ethno-national supremacy on a broader scale. This new report builds on Adalah’s October 2024 position paper, which reviewed eight bills, most of which were later enacted into laws. The laws covered in these reports join the laws already documented in Adalah’s Discriminatory Laws Database, bringing the total to about 100 discriminatory laws.
Adalah’s Discriminatory Laws Database
LEGISLATIVE TRENDS
The report identifies several key legislative trends. First, it documents new amendments and the expanded use of the counterterrorism framework, which in practice is applied almost exclusively to Palestinian citizens of Israel (PCI) and Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem. The vague definitions of “terrorist act” and “terror organization” in the 2016 Counter-Terrorism Law and the subsequent amendments have become key tools for suppressing Palestinians’ freedom of expression, especially since October 2023. Another trend channels enormous state resources for Jewish-Israeli reservists into new privileges—tax, welfare, higher education and employment benefits—that by their nature exclude PCI. The report also highlights the institutionalization of temporary emergency measures, repeatedly renewed or made permanent, enabling widespread violations of detainees’ rights and punitive conditions against Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli custody.
CONSOLIDATING APARTHEID AND SYSTEMS OF REPRESSION
The report concludes that the Israeli legislature is consolidating a dual legal regime that privileges Jewish Israelis while systematically violating Palestinians’ rights. However, unlike historical systems of racial or religious supremacy, such as apartheid South Africa or Jim Crow in the U.S., most of the Israeli laws cited in the report use neutral legal language. Their legislative history and application, however, demonstrate the systematic targeting of Palestinians.
These laws criminalize legitimate political expression, authorize deportations of (Palestinian) families, block (Palestinian) family unification, permit the dismissal of (Palestinian) teachers, revoke (Palestinian families’) social welfare benefits if their minor children are convicted of what is characterized as “security offenses” (including stone-throwing), expand detention powers and prolonged detention, restrict access to legal counsel, and close independent media outlets. They violate both Israel’s constitutional principles and its obligations under international treaties. In the OPT, they further breach Israel’s duties under international humanitarian law.
The report references the July 2024 International Court of Justice (ICJ) Advisory Opinion, which found that Israel’s prolonged occupation is illegal, and that discriminatory legislation constitutes a breach of the prohibition on racial segregation and apartheid under Article 3 of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD). It also situates these new laws within Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, including measures restricting UNRWA operations and humanitarian aid, directly violating the ICJ’s provisional measures in the South Africa v. Israel case. Other laws, such as the Unlawful Combatants Law, enable arbitrary detention and enforced disappearances, contributing to the systemic repression of Palestinians detained in Israel from Gaza. The closure of media outlets such as Al-Jazeera serves to conceal atrocities and prevent scrutiny of state violence.
Adalah also documents additional pending bills – many of which are currently before the Knesset in its session that began at the end of October – that would further erode democratic participation and equality. These pending bills would expand the grounds for disqualifying Arab Knesset parties and candidates, bar the employment of teachers holding degrees from Palestinian academic institutions, dismiss university staff based on political views, entrench West Bank annexation through jurisdictional changes, and tax foreign government funding to human rights NGOs, among others. A separate bill mandates the death penalty for killing an Israeli citizen out of “racism or hostility toward the public”, “aiming to harm the State of Israel and the revival of the Jewish people in its homeland”.
Taken together, these legislative initiatives reveal that this Israeli government and parliament continue to act in defiance of the state’s constitutional commitments and international law, reinforcing a regime of apartheid and deepening the denial of Palestinian collective and individual rights.
- Photo: A vote during a Knesset plenum session, Jerusalem, 12 June 2025. Photo by Chaim Goldberg/ Flash90