The Punishment That Never Ends: Israel’s Unprecedented Push to Strip Palestinian Citizens of Their Birthright 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has invoked a controversial 2023 law to petition a court to strip two Palestinian citizens of Israel—including a man who already served 22 years in prison—of their citizenship over past terrorism convictions, arguing that payments they allegedly received from a Palestinian Authority fund justify deporting them to the West Bank or Gaza despite international conventions prohibiting statelessness; the move, which critics say applies only to Palestinian citizens while explicitly excluding Jewish Israelis convicted of similar or worse offenses, represents a fundamental shift in Israeli jurisprudence that would make Israel one of the few nations to revoke the birthright citizenship of native-born citizens, transforming what was once considered an unconditional status into a conditional privilege that can be retroactively revoked years after sentences have been fully served.

The Punishment That Never Ends: Israel’s Unprecedented Push to Strip Palestinian Citizens of Their Birthright 

For the first time since a controversial 2023 law was rushed through parliament, Israel is testing whether it can take away citizenship from Palestinian citizens convicted of violent crimes—even those who have already served decades in prison. 

The court documents filed Thursday by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office bear the clinical language of legal procedure. They cite specific criminal codes, reference parliamentary statutes, and outline the state’s rationale for why two men—Mohamad Hamad, 48, and another unnamed individual—should no longer be considered Israeli citizens despite having been born with that status. 

But beneath the legal jargon lies something far more personal: a fundamental reimagining of what it means to be a citizen of Israel when you are also Palestinian. 

Hamad has already served 22 years in prison. He was convicted in 2002 on charges including shootings and weapons trafficking—acts that no one disputes were serious, violent, and caused genuine harm. By any conventional measure of justice, he has paid his debt to society. He completed his sentence. He returned to his family in east Jerusalem. He began rebuilding a life. 

Now, decades after his crimes, the man who leads the Israeli government wants him stripped of his nationality and expelled from the country where he has spent his entire existence. 

The Citizenship Question Israel Never Asked—Until Now 

The 2023 law that makes this possible represents a quiet revolution in Israeli jurisprudence. Historically, Israel has prided itself on avoiding the kind of citizenship-stripping provisions common in European nations dealing with terrorism convictions among dual nationals or naturalized citizens. France, Britain, and others have controversially revoked citizenship from individuals with second passports, leaving them citizens of their other country of origin. But international law has long held a firm barrier: states should not render people stateless. 

Israel’s innovation—or its end-run around this principle, depending on one’s perspective—lies in the creation of a legal fiction. The state argues that Palestinian citizens convicted of certain terrorism offences have established sufficient connection to the Palestinian Authority through the receipt of payments that they are not truly stateless when deported. They can be sent to the West Bank or Gaza. They will belong somewhere else. 

It is a distinction that leaves human rights lawyers shaking their heads in disbelief. These are not dual nationals who happen to have a second passport tucked away in a drawer. These are people who have held Israeli identity cards since birth, who have paid Israeli taxes, who have voted in Israeli elections, whose families have lived in Jaffa, Haifa, Lod, and east Jerusalem for generations—decades before the modern state of Israel existed. 

“The Israeli government is attempting to strip individuals of the very foundation through which all rights are protected, their nationality,” Hassan Jabareen, general director of Israel’s Adalah legal center, said Thursday. The word “foundation” is carefully chosen. Citizenship is not merely a legal status in Israel; it determines access to healthcare, freedom of movement, the ability to work, to reunite with family, to grow old in the neighborhood where one was raised. 

Take that foundation away, and everything else crumbles with it. 

The Two Men at the Center of the Storm 

Mohamad Hamad was 24 years old when he committed the crimes for which he would spend more than two decades in prison. He is now approaching 50. His children, if he has them, would be adults by now. His parents, if they are still alive, would be elderly. The east Jerusalem neighborhood where he grew up has likely changed dramatically in his absence, transformed by the slow, grinding machinery of occupation and urban development. 

The state’s case against him rests on two pillars: his 2002 terrorism conviction, and the allegation that he received payments from a Palestinian Authority fund that provides financial support to prisoners and their families. Israel has long denounced this fund, which it calls “pay-for-slay,” as a direct incentive for violence. Palestinian officials counter that they are simply providing a social safety net for families whose breadwinners are held in Israeli military detention—a system that has held hundreds of thousands of Palestinians over the decades, often without charge or trial. 

What neither side disputes is that Hamad’s crimes were real, his victims were real, and his punishment was already served. The question now is whether a sentence can be unilaterally extended by the state through the simple expedient of reclassifying the convict as no longer belonging to the nation that imprisoned him. 

The second man’s identity remains undisclosed, but Netanyahu’s statement that “more such cases were on their way” suggests that these two individuals are merely the opening salvo in what the government envisions as a broader campaign. For Palestinian citizens of Israel—who number roughly two million people, or one-fifth of the country’s population—the message is unmistakable: your citizenship is conditional in ways that Jewish Israelis’ citizenship is not. 

The Unequal Application That Defines the Debate 

This is perhaps the most uncomfortable dimension of the new policy, and the one that critics emphasize most forcefully. The 2023 law was drafted in such a way that its practical application falls almost entirely on Palestinian citizens. 

Jewish Israelis convicted of terrorism—and there have been many, particularly among the extremist settler movements responsible for attacks on Palestinian civilians, agricultural sabotage, and the establishment of illegal outposts—are not being threatened with citizenship revocation. They are not being deported to Gaza or the West Bank. They are not being told that their crimes have rendered them foreigners in their own homeland. 

The distinction is not incidental. The law specifically ties deportation eligibility to the receipt of payments from the Palestinian Authority fund. This creates, in effect, a racial classification system. Palestinian citizens convicted of violent crimes may have received such payments, or their families may have. Jewish Israelis convicted of similar or worse crimes against Palestinians have no connection to the Palestinian Authority and thus fall entirely outside the law’s reach. 

“It is one instance in which Israel’s legal system treats Jewish and Palestinian citizens differently,” critics noted when the law passed in 2023. Two years later, that assessment has proven prophetic. The state is now actively seeking to implement this differential treatment, to embed it in case law, to normalize the proposition that citizenship means different things for different people within the same country. 

For many Palestinian citizens, this feels less like a new policy than the formalization of something they have long understood: that their nominal equality under Israeli law has always been fragile, always contingent, always revocable when political winds shift. 

Netanyahu’s Political Calculus 

The timing of this legal move is not accidental. Netanyahu, who returned to power in late 2022 at the head of the most right-wing government in Israeli history, has made the Palestinian Authority payments a consistent focus of his rhetoric. He has pressed foreign governments to cut aid to the PA over the issue, lobbied the United States to classify the fund as a terrorist financing mechanism, and repeatedly invoked the payments as proof of Palestinian rejectionism. 

But the decision to activate the 2023 law now, against specific individuals, serves multiple political purposes simultaneously. 

Domestically, it allows Netanyahu to project strength on security issues at a moment when his government faces mounting criticism over its handling of the economy, its controversial judicial overhaul, and its uneasy relationship with the Biden administration. Citizenship revocation is visceral policy—easy to explain, difficult to defend against, and guaranteed to generate headlines that cast the prime minister as uncompromising in the face of terrorism. 

It also serves to further marginalize Israel’s Palestinian political leadership, which has struggled for decades to translate its demographic weight into meaningful political power. The message to Palestinian members of Knesset is unambiguous: you may hold office, you may speak in parliament, you may participate in the formal rituals of democracy, but the fundamental security of your constituents’ citizenship can be revoked by executive action whenever the government deems it expedient. 

Internationally, Netanyahu may be calculating that the post-October 7 political environment provides greater latitude for such measures. The 2023 Hamas attack and the subsequent Gaza war shifted global discourse on Israeli security, with many Western governments adopting more sympathetic postures toward Israeli counterterrorism operations. If citizenship revocation was controversial in 2023, it may be less so in 2026—or at least, less likely to generate sustained diplomatic pressure. 

The Bahrain Precedent, and Why It Matters 

The article notes that if Israel proceeds with citizenship revocation for native-born citizens, it would join a very small club of nations including Bahrain. The comparison is revealing. 

Bahrain, like several other Gulf states, has historically tied citizenship to sectarian identity in ways that create distinct classes of nationals. The country’s Sunni monarchy has periodically revoked the citizenship of Shia activists, political dissidents, and even senior religious figures, rendering them stateless or forcing them into exile. The practice has been widely condemned by human rights organizations as a form of political repression masquerading as administrative procedure. 

For Israel to align itself with such a model represents a significant departure from the self-image it has long cultivated as the region’s only democracy—however imperfect, however contested that characterization has become. Democracies do not, as a rule, strip native-born citizens of their nationality and expel them to territories they have never lived in, among populations with whom they may have no meaningful connection. 

The United Kingdom and France, as the article notes, have revoked citizenship from terrorism convicts, but only those with dual nationality. The logic, however strained, is that these individuals retain citizenship elsewhere. They are not rendered stateless; they are simply stripped of the particular citizenship they have abused. 

Israel’s innovation is to argue that Gaza or the West Bank constitutes a viable alternative nationality for Palestinian citizens who have no formal citizenship there, no legal status, and often no family or professional connections. It is an argument that requires the international community to accept that the occupied territories are functionally a separate state for the purpose of dumping unwanted citizens, even as Israel continues to insist that no such state exists for any other purpose. 

What Comes Next for Hamad and Others 

The court will now consider Netanyahu’s request. The proceedings could take months or longer, particularly given the constitutional novelty of the argument and the inevitable appeals that will follow any adverse ruling. Legal scholars are already debating whether the law can survive judicial scrutiny, given Israel’s own Basic Laws, which have been interpreted to protect certain fundamental rights even in the absence of a formal constitution. 

But the very fact that the question is being litigated represents a victory for the policy’s architects. Each day the case proceeds, the Overton window shifts. What was once unthinkable becomes debatable. What was debatable becomes normal. What is normal becomes precedent. 

For Mohamad Hamad, the stakes could not be more personal. He is a man who has already lost more than two decades of his life to incarceration. He is being asked to lose everything else—his home, his community, his country, his very legal existence—because of a law passed 21 years after his crimes were committed, designed to apply retroactively to people exactly like him. 

His lawyers will argue that this constitutes retroactive punishment, prohibited under international human rights law. They will argue that deporting a Jerusalemite to the West Bank, where he has never lived and may have no legal right to reside, would violate the prohibition on cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. They will argue that stripping citizenship from someone who has already paid his debt to society serves no legitimate penal purpose—it is pure vengeance, dressed in legal robes. 

The state will argue that terrorism is not a crime like others, that its effects linger long after prison sentences end, and that societies have the right to defend themselves against those who have demonstrated profound hostility to the social contract. It will argue that the Palestinian Authority payments create an ongoing link between the convict and an entity Israel considers hostile, rendering continued citizenship untenable. 

Both sides will marshal legal precedents, philosophical arguments, and competing visions of what citizenship actually means. But beneath the competing interpretations of statutes and conventions lies a simpler question: Can a state expel people who have nowhere else to go, who have done nothing wrong since completing their punishment, whose only sin is that they were born on the wrong side of a national conflict that has now spanned three generations? 

The answer Israel gives will define not only the fate of two men currently awaiting judgment, but the meaning of citizenship for every Palestinian born within its borders. 

Beyond the Courtroom: The Human Cost of Conditional Belonging 

What the legal arguments cannot capture is the psychological weight of living under a system that can, at any moment, declare that you do not belong. 

Palestinian citizens of Israel have spent seventy-eight years navigating a paradox: they are formally equal, informally marginalized, legally protected in theory, and practically vulnerable in fact. They speak Hebrew and Arabic, consume Israeli media and Palestinian media, send their children to Israeli universities and watch those same children struggle to find employment commensurate with their qualifications. They vote in elections their communities boycotted for decades, serve in government ministries and on hospital staffs and in corporate boardrooms, and still find themselves asked, with suspicious frequency, where they are “really from.” 

The citizenship revocation law adds a new dimension to this precarity. It says, in effect, that the contract between state and citizen is not a covenant but a lease, terminable at the state’s discretion for behavior the state deems unacceptable. It says that a crime committed at twenty-four can still cost you your homeland at forty-eight. It says that punishment never truly ends, that debt is never fully paid, that forgiveness is not a concept that applies to citizens who belong to the wrong national community. 

This is the real significance of Netanyahu’s move this week. It is not merely about two convicted men, or about the Palestinian Authority payments, or about the technical requirements of anti-terrorism legislation. It is about the fundamental question of whether Israel can reconcile its identity as a Jewish state with its obligation to treat all its citizens equally. 

For decades, the answer has been an uneasy, contested, constantly renegotiated “maybe.” This week, the government offered a different answer—one that will now be tested in court, debated in the Knesset, scrutinized by international observers, and lived, every day, by two million people who woke up Thursday morning as Israeli citizens and went to bed uncertain whether that status would survive the legal machinery now moving against their countrymen. 

Mohamad Hamad served his time. He cannot serve it again. But under the logic the government has now formally embraced, he may be required to try.