Summary
The 2023 amendment adding s.9a to the Patient’s Rights Law, 1996, authorising a hospital director to prohibit or restrict bringing leavened bread (“hametz”) into a hospital for Passover kosher standards, which Adalah’s Discriminatory Laws Database presents as religious coercion re-enacting a policy the Israeli Supreme Court held illegal in 2020 (Discriminatory Laws Database, lines 165-229).
Details
- Section 9a requires the director, in setting the instructions, to consider alternative options and the rights and needs of patients including their medical needs, and permits considering the needs of accompanying individuals and hospital staff (line 186).
- Before 2020 hospitals widely banned leavened bread during Passover, with entry searches and confiscation or destruction of food, and some refusals of entry. In April 2020, on Adalah’s February 2018 petition, the Supreme Court overturned the ban, ruling that hospitals lacked authority to enforce kosher rules and that religious laws could not be imposed on the public (lines 190-192, and the Legal challenges section of the entry).
- Adalah’s account is that the 2023 law codifies that practice, that MKs stated in the plenum that its intention was to override the judgment and reinstate the “status quo ante”, and that it particularly affects Palestinian citizens of Israel, in the entry’s words mainly Muslims, Christians and Druze, including Palestinian hospital employees (lines 192-214). Adalah objected by letter on 14 March 2023 (line 206).