Israel’s Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday that the government’s restriction of 3,000 daily passengers allowed to return to Israel per day is unconstitutional and must be halted by the end of the week.

The court also ruled that the requirement for Israelis who haven’t been vaccinated or recovered from the coronavirus to receive special permission from an exceptions committee to enter Israel is illegal.

The ruling comes six days before the March 23 elections and after almost two months of closed borders, during which thousands of Israelis were stuck abroad.

The government justified the restrictions due to fear of mutated coronavirus variants that are resistant to vaccines entering the country.

The ruling said that the limitations “violate the basic constitutional right to enter and exit Israel, and others rights at the core of the democratic fabric of life.”

“The restrictions were set without the government having any data about the number of citizens abroad who want to return to the country, there was no explanation why the daily cap was set at 3,000, and the impression created is that instead of investing efforts and resources in enforcing quarantine… the government preferred to impose a regime of entry quotas, which is more simple to implement but infringes much more on basic rights.”

“This conclusion is magnified by the fact that Israel is the only democratic country in the world where citizens have been so sweepingly limited in entering their country.”

“The threat of the coronavirus and its different variants isn’t expected to disappear in the foreseeable future, despite the success of the vaccination drive,” the ruling stated, adding that the government must develop a solution that better balances the threat of variants versus the violation of basic civil rights.

The ruling slammed the government by writing that the restrictions were an “assault on the very heart of the legal right to enter Israel and to leave it, and other rights that are at the heart of the fabric of life in democratic societies.”

“In the future, any new restrictions on travel into or out of Israel need, in legal terms, a comprehensive, factual, data-based foundation.”

(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)