State audit finds unlawful camera surveillance and weak oversight in Israeli cities

Israel’s state comptroller published a report on Tuesday, June 16, 2026, exposing serious failures in the way municipalities use cameras to document parking violations and bus-lane offenses. The audit examined systems in Ramat Gan, Herzliya, Hadera, and Binyamina-Giv'at Ada, and said the main problems were violations of the legal duty to blur faces and a complete lack of oversight over the parking inspectors operating the cameras.

Ramat Gan was described as the worst case. In 2024, the city operated 100 cameras that produced about 36,000 tickets, but the comptroller found that roughly 256,000 events initially recorded as possible violations were deleted that year without any record of why they were removed. The report said there was no supervision of the inspectors who deleted them. It also found that 11.5 million shekels collected from bus-lane fines were not deposited in the required dedicated bank account. City officials told the comptroller the money was spent on purposes allowed by law, including public transport operations, bicycle lanes, and reducing private-car use, but the failure to deposit it means that claim cannot be verified.

The report said the cameras in Ramat Gan stored high-resolution images beyond what the law allows, making it possible for inspectors to identify passersby who were not involved in any offense. In Herzliya and Hadera, inspectors were able to remove face blurring on their own while reviewing cases, a loophole that was closed only after the comptroller’s intervention. In Binyamina-Giv'at Ada, the city stopped enforcing parking violations in March 2024 but kept filming streets around the clock and repurposed the cameras for security use without authorization.

Hadera was also found never to have enforced bus-lane driving violations in the city at all. The comptroller called on the Transportation Ministry to approach municipalities that are not issuing bus-lane fines and press them to begin doing so, and if they do not, to use its own enforcement powers. Those powers were granted at the end of 2022, shortly before Transportation Minister Miri Regev took office, but the report said they have never been used.