The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel Adalah said on Wednesday it “is fighting an Israeli government ban that prevents Arab citizens from bringing leavened bread products into hospitals during the Jewish holiday of Passover.”

In a challenging step, Adalah has filed a petition to the Israeli Supreme Court on Tuesday against the ban issued by the Israeli Ministry of Health.

The organization posed that the policy “has been enforced in hospitals nationwide over the past several years”, which allows hospitals to check people at all the hospital entrances and confiscate any leavened bread products found.
There were some incidents where people who refused to give up their bread to security guards were denied access to the hospital.

Sawsan Zaher, Adalah attorney, wrote in the petition that “there is no law in the State of Israel that prevents citizens from bringing leavened foods into hospitals and there is no law in the State of Israel that prevents them from bringing non-kosher food for their hospitalized relatives to eat.”

“The aggressive intervention of public authorities in private decisions regarding what to eat and where – particularly when an individual is in a vulnerable situation as is the case with hospitalized patients or visiting family members – is a violation of human liberty and personal dignity,” she added.

Passover is a Jewish holiday which is mainly a commemoration of Jews’ liberation by their God from slavery in ancient Egypt; it starts on the 15th of the Hebrew month of Nisan and lasts for a week. This year, Passover starts on March 30 and ends on April 7.