State Comptroller Finds Illegal and Poorly Supervised Use of City Surveillance Cameras

Israel’s State Comptroller has exposed serious failures in how municipalities use cameras to document parking violations and driving in public transport lanes. The report, published Tuesday, says the main problems are the illegal failure to blur people’s faces in footage and the complete lack of oversight over the municipal inspectors who handle the recordings.

The audit was conducted from June to October 2025 and reviewed systems in Ramat Gan, Herzliya, Hadera, and Binyamina-Giv’at Ada. The cameras in these cities have been operating for years and every recorded incident is supposed to be reviewed manually by an inspector, who decides whether to issue a ticket. The comptroller contrasted this with LPR cameras, which identify license plates and were recently ruled by a court to be used unlawfully for parking enforcement.

Ramat Gan was the worst case. In 2024, the city operated 100 cameras and issued about 36,000 tickets, but the comptroller found that roughly 256,000 recorded incidents were deleted that year without any record of why, and without any supervision of the inspectors who erased them. The city also failed to deposit about 11.5 million shekels collected from bus-lane fines into the required dedicated bank account. In addition, the cameras stored images at a higher resolution than allowed by law, making it possible for inspectors to identify passersby who were not involved in any offense.

The city told the comptroller that the 11.5 million shekels were spent on legally permitted public transport, bicycle lane, and private car reduction purposes, but said the missing deposit makes that impossible to verify. In Herzliya and Hadera, inspectors were able to remove face blurring on their own while reviewing incidents, a loophole that was closed only after the audit. In Binyamina-Giv’at Ada, parking enforcement stopped in March 2024, but the city continued filming streets around the clock and repurposed the cameras for security use without approval.

Hadera has never enforced the bus-lane violations that its own lane is meant to deter. The comptroller urged the Transport Ministry to pressure cities that are not enforcing bus-lane fines, and if they do not comply, to use its own authority to enforce the law. The report says that authority was granted at the end of 2022, shortly after Transportation Minister Miri Regev took office, but has never been used.