The Border Protection Bill proposed by MK Amit Halevi was approved by the Knesset plenum. The law fundamentally changes the concept regarding the country’s borders and the legal and security approach toward smuggling and smugglers along Israel’s borders.
The law went through a complicated series of obstacles, mainly due to strong past opposition from senior officials in the defense establishment.
For years, security agencies and the legal system treated border smuggling solely as a criminal and civilian matter. In practice, this meant that law enforcement authorities lacked the tools to deal with a phenomenon that had become a national scourge. The Shin Bet refused to treat it as a security matter, and the punishments handed down to smugglers were minor.
Until now, the smuggling offense appeared only in the Customs Ordinance. The new law makes a clear distinction between smuggling that occurs at an approved border crossing and smuggling across state borders - such as the Egyptian and Jordanian borders outside official crossing points.
The heated debate surrounding the law exposed a deep gap in basic concepts such as “national sovereignty." According to MK Halevi, security bodies operated under a flawed concept.
“A breach of the border is a violation of sovereignty, even if you are passing across a tissue. And a violation of sovereignty is a substantial and serious blow to national security," he explained.
Ultimately, the government changed its own version of the bill, and the new head of the Shin Bet, along with senior officials from the IDF and the National Security Council, accepted MK Halevi’s wording, and the two proposals were merged.
The law stipulates that indictments for smuggling offenses will no longer be heard in magistrates’ courts, but only in district courts. The penalty for this offense will be nine years of actual imprisonment, similar to other security offenses.
“This law is important first and foremost because it represents the beginning of a change in the defense establishment’s concept. It is named after Barel Hadaria Shmueli, who was killed on the Gaza fence because of the old and harmful concept. Today, we are correcting it," Halevi concluded.