Days before Pesach, the Knesset has passed a law allowing hospitals to ban all chametz foods during the holiday.

The legislation, pushed by the Ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism party, lets hospitals forbid leavened products for all visitors and staff, including those who aren't Jewish.

The new bill requires a hospital director to "take into consideration the rights and needs of patients" before making such a decision. It also requires that the law be published on the hospital's website, that signs be put up within the hospital, and that hospital employees and patients be kept updated on the matter.

Many non-Jewish hospital staff members, and could now be blocked from bringing homemade lunches to work.

Shas MK Uriel Busso, who chairs the Knesset Health Committee which prepared the bill for its final votes, said last week that the bill is “balanced” and “provides a response to exactly what the High Court of Justice was talking about.”

Yet secular MK Vladimir Beliak, of the opposition’s Yesh Atid party, decried the bill as “another layer of religious coercion that you are foisting on the public.

“This law will be followed by more laws, another attack, more steps to reduce this [secular] public’s freedoms. You’re violating the unwritten contract between citizens and the government.”

A prior version of the bill blocked any foods from being brought into a hospital that were not fresh produce or prepackaged with a kosher-for-Pesach label.

The United Torah Judaism party sponsored the bill, outraged after a 2020 High Court of Justice ruling which blocked hospitals from searching bags to check for chametz during Pesach, in response to petitions decrying the searches as invasive and religiously intrusive.

The issue of non-kosher foods in hospitals has come up every year in recent years, even serving as the official trigger for one politician, Yamina MK Silman, to quit the previous coalition.