With nowhere else to turn, Jana approached the Employment Service in July 2025 in order to apply for an income support benefit. Married couples seeking to receive the benefit are required to prove that their family income does not exceed approximately NIS 8,000. Jana declared that her husband was a resident of the Palestinian Authority who was in the process of family reunification, that he did not have a work permit, and that he was unemployed and had no income whatsoever.
In July 2025, the National Insurance Institute responded that, according to the records in its possession, the information Jana had provided was incorrect. Its records indicated that her husband was working and receiving income from occasional jobs. On this basis, her claim for an income support benefit was rejected.
Jana understood that the National Insurance Institute was relying on incorrect information, but she had no idea how to challenge the claims being made against her. She knew that her husband had no income, but she did not know how to prove that the information held by the authorities was wrong.
When Jana came to MAAN’s Jerusalem office in November 2025, MAAN’s team contacted the National Insurance Institute and demanded that she receive the benefit to which she was entitled. MAAN informed the National Insurance Institute that Jana’s husband had no income and that the information in its records was incorrect.
In response, the National Insurance Institute requested records of her husband’s income from the Payments Department of the Population and Immigration Authority. The Payments Department is responsible for depositing pension contributions for Palestinian workers and therefore holds information on every Palestinian worker who is legally employed in Israel.
However, a new obstacle emerged. The Payments Department refused to release the information directly to the worker and required him to be represented by a lawyer. Only after MAAN’s attorney Abeer Jubran contacted the Payments Department on the worker’s behalf did MAAN receive a detailed report documenting his pension deposits during the relevant period.
The report confirmed Jana’s claim: throughout the entire period from October 2023 onward, her husband had had no income whatsoever.
Once this information had been submitted, the National Insurance Institute required Jana to file a new claim for income support. MAAN then contacted the management of the National Insurance Institute and demanded that her eligibility for the months in question be reconsidered on the basis of the documents that had been provided.
With the new information in hand, MAAN’s team submitted a new claim for income support on Jana’s behalf, covering the period from July 2025 through December 2025. In August 2026, a year after Jana had submitted her original claim, the National Insurance Institute finally approved her eligibility and paid her a total of NIS 10,444 for the months during which she had been registered with the Employment Service.
We are glad that justice was ultimately done for Jana and her family. Yet her experience also exposes a deeper problem. Jana knew that her husband had no income, but it took a year, repeated interventions, legal assistance and the retrieval of official records from another government authority to correct information that was wrong from the outset.
The ordeal and the suspicion that accompanied Jana’s attempt to obtain a benefit to which she was entitled—and, more broadly, the suspicion that appears to accompany every request for assistance by a Palestinian applicant—deserve to be addressed and corrected. No family in a situation of economic hardship should have to endure such a prolonged struggle simply to prove that its declared income is, in fact, zero.
