Israel’s post-7 October legal blitz cements apartheid and protects Jewish supremacy says new report

In the wake of the 7 October, Israel’s far-right government has unleashed an unprecedented wave of legislation designed to entrench Jewish supremacy and strip Palestinians of their most basic rights. A new report by the Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel (Adalah) documents this two-year surge of racist, repressive laws, arguing they form a legal infrastructure of apartheid aimed at preserving Israel’s ethno-nationalist identity.

Titled “Post-7 October: A New Wave of Anti-Palestinian Israeli Laws”, the report lays bare how Israel’s lawmakers, under the cover of its genocide in Gaza, have institutionalised a legal framework that criminalises Palestinian identity, punishes dissent, and reinforces the supremacy of the Jewish majority across all areas of historic Palestine.

Read: The evolving face of apartheid: How Israel’s policies institutionalise Palestinian displacement

According to Adalah, the cumulative effect is the entrenchment of “Jewish ethno-national supremacy throughout all territory under its control,” echoing long-standing structural discrimination already embedded in Israel’s constitutional framework

Over 30 discriminatory laws has been passed on the wake of the Gaza genocide. Adalah states that these laws “reinforce and entrench the ongoing pattern in Israeli law of creating and consolidating separate legal systems for Palestinians and Jews.”

One of the most shocking laws described in the report is the Deportation of Families of Terrorists Law, passed in November 2024. This law empowers the Interior Minister to expel Palestinians—citizens and residents alike—not because they committed any offense, but simply because they are related to someone Israel designates as a “terrorist operative.” The report emphasizes that deportation can be ordered if a family member supposedly “knew, or should have known in advance, about the terrorist’s plan” or if they merely “expressed support or identification with the terror act.”

Another law the report highlights for its discriminatory purpose is the dramatic expansion of the ban on Palestinian family unification under the 2025 amendments to the Citizenship and Entry into Israel framework. Under this new regime, Palestinians from the West Bank or Gaza—even those married to citizens or long-term residents of Israel—can be denied legal status solely because a distant relative is categorised as a “terror operative.”

Read: Israel advances bill on the ‘consumption of terrorist materials’ with plan to jail people for their thoughts

The law defines family expansively to include “parents, spouses, children, siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces, and step-relatives,” meaning entire extended families can be permanently separated.

Equally alarming is the law allowing the Education Ministry to dismiss teachers or defund entire schools based on allegations, often from the Shin Bet, that a teacher “identified” with terrorism. This standard is so vague that Adalah argues it is designed to target Palestinian teachers for expressing any opinion “outside the Israeli/Zionist consensus.”

The criminal legal system, too, has been reshaped in ways that overwhelmingly and deliberately burden Palestinians. The Unlawful Combatants Law, long criticized for permitting indefinite detention without trial, has been expanded under temporary orders that allow Palestinians from Gaza to be held “without a detention order for up to 45 days,” while denying them access to a lawyer for as long as “180 days” with court approval

Finally, even Israel’s social welfare system has been transformed into a tool of punishment directed at Palestinians. One amendment strips Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza of disability and work-injury benefits, even if they paid into the system, whenever they or a family member is labelled a “terror operative,” a designation often made “based solely on secret evidence.”

Adalah warns that the wave of legislation is not an aberration but the culmination of a political and constitutional order rooted in ethnic supremacy. The report argues that Israel’s institutions, executive, legislative, and judicial, are working in concert to “consolidate a regime of ethno-national supremacy on an even larger scale.”