العربية
HE
العربية
HE
“It must be remembered that the uncompromising fight against bigamy should be directed first and foremost against its perpetrators, and not against its victims.”
(AAA 4821/21, A. v. Minister of Interior, judgment of Justice Grosskopf).
Polygamy is a criminal offense in Israel under Section 176 of the Penal Law, 5737-1977, punishable by imprisonment. For this reason, the State decided that in marriages involving more than one wife, no family reunification application may be submitted or renewed for any of the women. While the purpose of the prohibition on polygamy is to protect the rights of women and children, denying Israeli stay permits on this basis has the opposite effect – a severe violation of their rights. Alongside other systemic flaws in Israel’s status regularization regime, this restriction creates situations in which women who have lived their entire lives in East Jerusalem suddenly find themselves without legal status.
Such is the case of G., a resident of East Jerusalem who, in 2022, after three decades of living in the city, discovered that her stay permit would not be renewed because her husband had married a second wife.
G. was born in 1989 in Bethlehem. Her mother was a West Bank resident and her father was a Jerusalem resident. She soon moved to Jerusalem, where she was raised and educated. Despite having lived her entire life in Jerusalem and being the daughter of a permanent resident, G. was never formally registered as a Jerusalem resident. This resulted from a combination of factors, including the extreme inaccessibility of the Population Authority office in East Jerusalem at the time, as well as unconstitutional laws in force between 2002–2005 that imposed age restrictions (and at times an absolute ban) on the registration of children as part of the family unification procedure. In 2004, at age 15, her family married her to a man five years her senior who was a Jerusalem resident. Beginning in 2015, she received stay permits through family unification.
The turning point came after the birth of their youngest child, when G.’s husband married a second wife without her knowledge or consent. As a result, in January 2022, the State refused to renew her family unification application. G. was left without any legal status in Israel, despite having lived in Jerusalem for 30 years and despite the fact that her five children, her father, and all her siblings are permanent residents.
On February 8, 2023, G. submitted an application for status on humanitarian grounds, to avoid separation from her children and family and deportation from the place where she has lived her entire life. The application was denied on December 18, 2023, on the grounds that the Minister of Interior did not deem it appropriate to intervene in an “internal family matter,” such as a bigamous marriage, despite the fact that this very matter had been the reason for revoking her stay permits in the first place
Following the refusal, G. contacted HaMoked, which filed an administrative petition with the District Court on her behalf. The petition argued that bigamy should be recognized as a gender-based offense that serves as humanitarian grounds for granting legal status. Such decisions are usually made without the woman’s consent and sometimes, as in G.’s case, without her knowledge. This decision, forced upon women by external actors, deprives them of their legal status and threatens to sever them from their closest support networks—their family and children.
HaMoked further requested that the Court consider the best interests of G.’s five children, residents of East Jerusalem, two of whom suffer from chronic illnesses. The petition also emphasized that G. has lived in Jerusalem her entire life and that her father is a Jerusalem resident, meaning she is not substantively a West Bank resident. It was further noted that G. had been entitled to status since childhood but was unlawfully excluded due to the child marriage forced upon her.
As a result of the petition, the Court instructed the Ministry of the Interior to reconsider its decision. After a review, during which the Ministry considered each aspect of G.’s life separately and concluded that none independently justified humanitarian status, it upheld its refusal. HaMoked filed another petition, highlighting the fact that G.’s daughter suffers from a neurological condition requiring treatment and supervision. The Ministry again requested to re-examine the application in light of the daughter’s condition, but ultimately maintained its refusal, and the petition was withdrawn.
Only after HaMoked filed a third petition did the Court, in a judgment issued on January 12, 2026, accept HaMoked’s arguments and order the Ministry of Interior to grant G. renewable stay permits in Israel. The Court noted that the Ministry’s position that girls’ child marriage is “common” in Palestinian society and therefore could constitute a humanitarian ground raises questions.
Using paternalistic arguments about protecting women to justify policies that, in practice, hurt them is common in governmental systems around the world, particularly in systems where the power disparity between the regime and its subjects is particularly intense (see in this context the article by anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod, 2002, “Do Muslim Women Need Saving?”). The system regulating legal status in Israel through family reunification is a clear example of this phenomenon.
In G.’s case, the successful petition prevented her deportation from the place where she has lived her entire life and her separation from her family. However, the Ministry of Interior’s policy denying status in Israel to women in bigamous marriages remains unchanged. Unless this policy is fundamentally revised, it is the victims of bigamy — rather than its perpetrators — who will continue to pay the price.
