Israel revokes citizenship of Arab prisoners for aiding Hamas

Current to July 27, 2026, the citizenship-stripping record around Arab Palestinian prisoners convicted of aiding or supporting Hamas-related terrorism has two distinct 2026 tracks. The first is the February 10, 2026 reported Netanyahu order using the 2023 PA-compensation amendment against two Palestinian citizens of Israel, Mahmoud Ahmed, who was released in 2024, and Muhammad Ahmed Hussein Helsi, who was reported as due for release in 2034.[1][2] The second is the July 22, 2026 State Attorney’s Office filing seeking to revoke the citizenship of Rani Ouf and Shadi Aidi after convictions connected to an alleged wartime plot to disable Cellcom’s network to aid Hamas.[3][4]

Those are not the same legal event. The February order belongs to a ministerial pathway triggered by Palestinian Authority compensation after a terrorism conviction. The July Cellcom matter belongs to the criminal-track breach-of-loyalty route tied to the underlying prosecution. The difference matters because the first route turns on a statutory presumption about status in PA-controlled territory, while the second asks a court to use the citizenship-revocation power through the criminal case.

The two 2026 pathways

For the Ouf and Aidi matter, the accessible public record used here is Israel National News and JFeed. The Times of Israel material associated with the same keyword trail is paywalled, and the stronger primary record would be the underlying Central District Court filings if obtained. That limitation does not erase the reported filing, but it does limit how far one can go on procedural detail without guessing.

What the 2023 amendment changed

The 2023 statute is formally framed as the Law for Revocation of Citizenship or Residency of a Terrorist who Receives Compensation for Carrying out a Terrorist Act. Its core move is to connect a terrorism conviction with receipt of Palestinian Authority compensation, then require citizenship or residency revocation and deportation through a compressed statutory process.[5] The Knesset approved the measure by a 94-10 vote in February 2023.[6]

The operational pieces are the parts counsel should isolate. The amendment creates a PA-compensation trigger. It requires deportation after revocation. It gives a short 30-day window for judicial review. It also replaces the earlier Attorney General approval requirement with approval by the Justice Minister.[5] Each of those changes moves the case away from a slower, court-centered breach-of-loyalty model and toward an administrative sequence in which the state’s status theory is already built into the statute.

That status theory is the central legal signal. The amendment uses a rebuttable presumption that receiving PA payments means the person has status in the Palestinian Authority-controlled territory. On paper, a presumption can be challenged. In practice, critics argue that this presumption can function much more conclusively because it supplies the state with the answer to the statelessness problem before the affected person reaches meaningful review.[5]

This is why the February 2026 order is more than a new sanctions headline. It is the first reported operational use of a statutory mechanism that tries to solve, in advance, the problem that made earlier citizenship revocation legally harder: what status remains after the passport is taken away.

Zayoud is the hinge

The relevant pre-2023 baseline is the Supreme Court’s 2022 Zayoud decision. A seven-justice panel upheld the possibility of revoking citizenship for breach of loyalty, but imposed a safeguard: if revocation would leave the person stateless, the state had to grant permanent residency.[7] That safeguard did not make citizenship revocation impossible. It made the consequence incomplete unless the state also accounted for the person’s remaining legal status.

The 2023 amendment appears designed around that safeguard. If PA compensation is treated as evidence that the person already has, or can be deemed to have, status in PA-controlled territory, the state can argue that the Zayoud permanent-residency requirement is not triggered in the same way. Verfassungsblog described the amendment as a citizenship deprivation-deportation pipeline because the loss of status and removal consequence are joined in one statutory design.[8]

That does not mean the Supreme Court has accepted the workaround. It means the state has now used the mechanism while the constitutional question remains open. For a risk file, the important line is between operationalization and validation: Israel has operationalized the amendment, but no final ruling identified as of July 27, 2026 has resolved whether the amendment survives constitutional review.

The February order: PA compensation as the switch

The February 10 order reportedly targeted Mahmoud Ahmed and Muhammad Ahmed Hussein Helsi, both Palestinian citizens of Israel convicted of terrorism offenses and alleged to have received Palestinian Authority payments.[1][2] On the available record, the order is best understood as the first operational use of the 2023 amendment rather than a fresh criminal judgment. The conviction and the alleged PA compensation are the statutory inputs; the deprivation-and-removal machinery is the consequence.

That matters for timing. In a criminal-track filing, defense counsel can fight the remedy within the criminal case posture. Under the PA-compensation route, the affected person and counsel must focus immediately on the statutory review window, the evidentiary basis for the payment allegation, the claimed destination status, and whether any proposed deportation would leave the person without a legally durable status. The question is not only whether the original conviction was serious. It is whether the later administrative step can lawfully convert that conviction and payment allegation into loss of citizenship and removal.

The Cellcom filing: the criminal-track route

The July 22, 2026 filing involving Rani Ouf and Shadi Aidi is the clearer match for the phrase “convicted of aiding Hamas.” Israel National News reported that the State Attorney’s Office sought to strip their citizenship after they were convicted over a plot to disable Cellcom’s network during wartime in a way that would aid Hamas.[3] JFeed likewise described the request as a legal precedent in connection with a Hamas plot.[4]

The procedural posture is different from the February order. Here, the state is not simply invoking the PA-compensation amendment after a conviction. It is asking for citizenship revocation through the criminal-track breach-of-loyalty route. The unresolved questions therefore run through the court file: what precise statutory provision the prosecution invoked, what findings the sentencing or post-conviction court is asked to make, whether permanent residency or another status is proposed if revocation creates statelessness, and how the court frames proportionality.

Until the underlying filing is public or otherwise accessible, it is safer to treat the Ouf/Aidi case as a reported State Attorney’s Office request rather than as proof of a final deprivation outcome. A request to revoke citizenship, a court order granting revocation, a deportation order, and a final appellate ruling are separate procedural events.

Why the enforcement pattern is part of the legal risk

The equality objection is not just atmospheric. In the Zayoud proceedings, Interior Ministry data disclosed to the Supreme Court showed that, since the 2008 breach-of-loyalty provision was enacted, 31 citizenship-revocation cases had been considered and none involved Jewish Israeli citizens. Only three revocation requests had reached a court, and all three targeted Palestinian citizens.[7][8] That dataset belongs to the Zayoud-era record and should not be stretched into a complete post-2023 enforcement count, but it is directly relevant to how courts and litigants read selective-enforcement claims.

Legislative history adds a second layer. During the debate over the 2023 measure, MK Hanoch Milwidsky was reported as saying, “I prefer Jewish murderers to Arab murderers,” while MK Limor Son Har-Melech also made statements cited by critics as evidence of discriminatory design.[6][8] The quote is not a substitute for statutory analysis, but it is unusually direct intent evidence in a record where the operative burden still falls on the text, the enforcement pattern, and the court’s treatment of status after revocation.

The Al-Halaseh petition is the live checkpoint

The constitutional challenge now carrying the most weight is the Al-Halaseh petition, HCJ 76360-04-26, filed on April 30, 2026. Adalah reported that the petition challenges the 2023 amendment on four grounds: violation of the right to citizenship, violation of the prohibition on statelessness, discriminatory application, and curtailment of judicial review.[9]

As of July 27, 2026, that petition leaves the amendment’s validity unresolved. It does not invalidate the law. It also does not bless the law. The pending posture matters because any assessment of the February order has to remain provisional until the court decides whether the PA-compensation presumption and deportation sequence can coexist with Zayoud’s statelessness safeguard.

The judicial-review claim is especially practical. A 30-day review window is not merely a calendar detail when the state’s theory of destination status is embedded in the statute. Counsel must be able to test the payment evidence, the claimed legal status in PA-controlled territory, the proposed destination, and the availability of permanent residency if the presumption fails. If review is too narrow to test those points, the process may preserve the appearance of court access while leaving the decisive status question effectively pre-decided.

What should be tracked next

The monitoring file should stay divided by pathway. For the February PA-compensation route, the key documents are any ministerial order, payment evidence, review filing, deportation order, and court treatment of the statutory presumption. For the Ouf/Aidi criminal-track route, the key documents are the State Attorney’s Office request, the Central District Court record, any order granting or denying revocation, and any status remedy if citizenship is removed.

The legal threshold crossed in 2026 is narrow but significant. Israel has operationalized two parallel citizenship-deprivation routes involving Arab Palestinian citizens convicted of aiding or supporting Hamas-related terrorism: a PA-compensation amendment route already used by reported ministerial order, and a criminal-track breach-of-loyalty route invoked in the Cellcom case. The final legal limits of review, deportation, and statelessness protection remain unsettled while Al-Halaseh and any accessible underlying criminal filings are still doing the work that headlines cannot do.

References

1. Netanyahu approves expulsion of terrorists with Israeli citizenship — Jerusalem Post, 10 Feb 2026
2. How Israel used discriminatory laws to strip Palestinians of citizenship — Al Jazeera, 12 Feb 2026
3. Unprecedented: State seeks to strip citizenship from terrorists — Israel National News, 22 Jul 2026
4. Citizenship Revocation for Hamas Plot: Legal Precedent — JFeed, 22 Jul 2026
5. Law for Revocation of Citizenship or Residency of a Terrorist who Receives Compensation for Carrying out a Terrorist Act — Adalah
6. Israel votes to strip citizenship from Arabs convicted of terrorism — The Guardian, 16 Feb 2023
7. Q&A: Israeli Supreme Court allows government to strip citizenship for 'breach of loyalty' — Adalah, 14 Sep 2022
8. Israel's New Citizenship Deprivation-Deportation Pipeline — Verfassungsblog, 21 Feb 2023
9. Adalah petitions against law used to revoke citizenship — Adalah, 1 May 2026