A party (illustration)
A party (illustration)Israel news photo: Flash 90

The Knesset voted Wednesday 26 to 20 in favor of a bill that would allow police to break into a home without a warrant, if there is loud noise coming out of that home. The bill passed in the preliminary reading and has three more readings to go before it becomes law.

Yisrael Hayom said that the law would make it easier for police to deal with citizens' complaints about noise. The explanatory notes to the bill say that police have to deal with numerous complaints every day, by residents who report “some kind of noise in their surroundings,” and that events such as these could turn violent.

Education Minister Shai Piron (Yesh Atid), who presented the bill before the Knesset, explained that “policemen who are called to deal with noise events sometimes face a situation in which the source of the noise is positively identified as coming from a certain apartment, yet the people inside refuse to open the door for the police.

"The way to grant authority to enter the premises is to obtain a search warrant from a court, but this is an action that takes time and is not practical in most cases,” Piron said.

MK Michal Rosin (Meretz) opposed the bill and said it would infringe on the civil rights of the residents of the home that is broken into.