One Rule, Two Legal Systems: Israel’s Regime of Laws in the West Bank

Photo: © Oguz Eren | Dreamstime.com

In the West Bank, two systems of law govern one territory: a civilian legal system for Israeli citizens, and a military court system for Palestinian residents. The differential legal treatment created by this system does not just lead to injustice in a few specific cases; rather, it is woven into almost every part of daily life in the region.

Military Law vs. Israeli Civilian Law 

Since 1967, Israel has governed the West Bank through two parallel legal tracks. Israeli citizens living in the territory remain under the jurisdiction of Israeli law and the Israeli civilian legal system, benefitting from all of the rights and protections that come with it, including the Basic Laws safeguarding human dignity and due process. Palestinians in the same territory, by contrast, live under military law: an accumulation of thousands of military orders issued by IDF commanders since 1967, layered atop the Jordanian law that preceded the occupation. Palestinians are tried in military courts for every offense, under procedures that carry fewer due-process protections than a civilian court provides. 

The procedural gap runs deeper than which courtroom a person ends up in. Israeli military authorities provide no legal aid to Palestinian defendants; their lawyers are instead funded by the Palestinian Authority, NGOs, or are paid for privately. Proceedings are conducted in Hebrew, a language most defendants don't speak, with often inconsistent translation.  Few cases ever even reach the trial stage, with the vast majority of convictions coming from a plea bargain rather than a full hearing.  

The result of this system is that institutionalized discrimination is built into the legal architecture of the region itself, manifesting itself in a variety of ways.  

Administrative Detention

Palestinians who are arrested are held under administrative detention. The military commander is empowered to hold someone in administrative detention for renewable six-month periods based on classified evidence that neither the detainee nor their lawyer may see. No criminal charges need to be filed, and there is no formal cap on how many times an order can be renewed – detentions can, and do, stretch into years.  

The practice is not, in principle, limited to Palestinians – Israeli citizens can also be held administratively. In reality, however, very few Israeli settlers have ever been held this way, against a Palestinian administrative-detainee population now numbering in the thousands, including a recent surge in the number of Palestinian minors being held administratively in the past year.  

In fact, the de facto asymmetry at the heart of the practice has been stated openly by the government itself: Defense Minister Israel Katz has stopped approving administrative detention orders against Jewish suspects while expanding their use against Palestinians, explicitly defending the distinction on the grounds that settler violence does not constitute terrorism while Palestinian violence does. In this case, therefore, the precise differential legal treatment of the ‘one rule, two legal systems’ framework is explicitly articulated by an Israeli senior official himself. 

Treatment of Security Prisoners

Palestinians held or convicted on security grounds fall into a distinct legal category – “security prisoners,” – that carries fewer protections than ordinary criminal custody. The overwhelming majority of this population are Palestinians from the occupied territories, some of whom are held inside Israel itself in violation of prohibitions on transferring prisoners out of occupied territory.  

Security prisoners are held in extremely poor conditions, mainly as a result of severe prison overcrowding. When Israel introduced a temporary law to relieve prison overcrowding through early release, it explicitly excluded security prisoners from eligibility; ACRI has repeatedly petitioned the Supreme Court against this carve-out, arguing it is arbitrary and defeats the law’s own stated purpose. Moreover, the Minister of National Security has pursued a policy in reducing the quantity and quality of food provided to security prisoners, which has resulted in malnutrition and even death. ACRI successfully petitioned the Supreme Court to ensure that prisoners’ nutritional needs are met, but the Minister and the Israel Prison Service have ignored the ruling, forcing ACRI to file a contempt of court motion. 

Living conditions for security prisoners have also grown harder to monitor from outside. Israel barred the International Committee of the Red Cross from visiting detainees after October 7^th, a restriction the state defended for more than two years while requesting 27 extensions before a hearing was even held. In June 2026, the Supreme Court ordered that visits resume, ruling in favor of a petition brought by ACRI and other organizations that asserted that the government had no adequate justification for the ban. The government, however, has defied the Court’s ruling and ACRI was recently forced to file a contempt of court motion to compel the visits to resume.  

The system has since fragmented further still. In May 2026, the Knesset created yet another track: a special military tribunal for October 7^th related detainees, conducted largely online by video link, with relaxed evidentiary rules and the option of closed or livestreamed mass proceedings. The video hearings also remove another layer of oversight when it comes to the treatment of security prisoners, as their physical conditions remain hidden. Such is a further illustration that each new legal category applied to Palestinians tends to carry fewer protections than the last.  

Settler Cooperation with Law Enforcement

Where Palestinians face an increasingly punitive track, Israeli settlers benefit from an enforcement apparatus built around protecting them. Thousands of settlers serve as “civilian security coordinators,” locally employed by the Ministry of Defense with quasi-military powers. They are heavily armed, and often indistinguishable in the field from soldiers, since many are also reservists.  

ACRI’s own casework shows what this looks like in practice. After a settler was murdered near Bruqin in May 2025, the village endured weeks of organized settler violence – arson, home invasions, assaults – much of it in the presence of soldiers who did not act to stop it, and on at least one occasion let rioters through to reach the village. When police were eventually called, their arrival was delayed and no arrests were made. ACRI appealed to the District Police Commander, the Civil Administration, and the Central Command, demanding the outpost driving the violence be evacuated and the soldiers who stood by be investigated. The outpost, however, was not evacuated, and no arrests of settlers were made.  

This is not simply an operational choice the army is free to make – it runs against Israel’s own legal obligations. As the occupying power, the IDF is required under international law to protect the local population’s safety; soldiers who witness an attack on Palestinians are legally obligated to intervene or arrest the assailant, not simply defer to a police force that is, in practice, thin on the ground across the West Bank. Yet the gap between that duty and the practice is stark: soldiers are rarely found to stop settler violence when present, and have often been reported to decline to intervene or have even joined in. So, while settlers benefit from the close ties described above and can generally count on a fast response, Palestinians often cannot count on one at all.  

Palestinian Encounters with Law Enforcement

Palestinian encounters with law enforcement are shaped by an imbalance that runs in two directions. Israeli soldiers may enter and search a Palestinian home at any hour, without a warrant, whenever they judge it necessary for public order – a power Israel’s own Supreme Court has upheld. Yet searching a settler’s home in the same territory requires the same judicial warrant it would anywhere else in Israel. The law treats one population’s front door as inviolable, and the others as something soldiers may walk through on their own authority. 

Moreover, Palestinians are often treated by the military as presumptively guilty. Often, if a Palestinian appeals to the military for help during a settler attack the military will arrive and arrest the Palestinian who has asked for help. ACRI has also filed an appeal in response to a troubling trend in which the military will detain a Palestinian for no discernible reason, hold them for hours in harsh conditions without their relatives being notified about their whereabouts, and then abandoned in random areas and forced to find their own way home. 

The imbalance is just as stark when a Palestinian is the one seeking help rather than the one being searched. Under the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian Authority has no jurisdiction over Israeli citizens, so a Palestinian harmed by a settler has exactly one address to turn to: the Israeli police.

Reaching the police station is itself a tall order; police stations serving the West Bank are typically located inside the settlements themselves, meaning a complainant first has to arrange transport there and then often wait outside for hours in poor conditions before being seen – a process that discourages many people from following through at all. Those who do get inside often need a Hebrew-Arabic interpreter who isn't always available on request, and investigators have at times given only generalized, boilerplate reasons for declining to take a statement at all. Filing online is effectively out of reach for most Palestinian complainants. 

The Bruqin case captures the pattern from the other end: despite residents documenting much of the violence on video, police did not collect witness testimonies or gather evidence, and made no effort to investigate the online incitement that accompanied the attacks. This is not an isolated failure: two-decade monitoring of settler-violence investigations found that cases close without an indictment nearly 94% of the time, and only 3% result in any conviction. Faced with those odds and the practical barriers that come with them, a majority of Palestinian victims don't file a complaint at all– an injustice that ACRI works hard to correct by accompanying Palestinian complainants to the station or filing complaints on their behalf.   

Where an Israeli victim of violence can generally expect a police response, an investigation, and a functioning court, a Palestinian victim in the same territory routinely gets none of the three. 

The Death Penalty Law

On March 30^th, 2026, the Knesset passed the Death Penalty for Terrorists Law, the most recent expression of the discriminatory dual legal system. Rather than adding one uniform punishment to the penal code, the law prescribes two different sentencing regimes for the same offense, split along the same military/civilian line described above. 

In the military courts that try Palestinians, a death sentence is now the mandatory default for anyone convicted of a terror-related killing, decided by a simple majority rather than a unanimous panel, with the military commander’s authority to pardon or commute a sentence revoked entirely. In Israel’s civilian courts, the death penalty remains only a discretionary maximum, reserved for murder committed with intent to “negate the existence of the State of Israel,” a definition that is written narrowly enough that it is not, in practice, applied to Jewish defendants. 

Almost immediately after the law passed, ACRI petitioned the Supreme Court to strike it down. Yet the petition remains unresolved whilst the law is in effect in military courts today. 

 The Same Story: One Territory, Two Outcomes 

In 2022, ACRI noted that the Justice Ministry’s response to the original “One Rule, Two Legal Systems” report did not involve any denial of the facts, just a justification of them as a matter of security necessity. Four years, three wars, and a wave of new legislation later, the facts have not changed, and the situation has continued to deteriorate. The same territory still produces two different outcomes for two different sets of people.  

This post was written with the assistance of ACRI Attorney Reut Shaer and ACRI intern Ben Lubitsh