[4] They permit the establishment of military tribunals to try civilians, prohibitions on the publication of books and newspapers, house demolitions, indefinite administrative detention, extensive powers of search and seizure, the sealing off of territories and the imposition of curfews.
[6] Professor Alan Dowty writes that the Regulations reflected the preoccupations of a colonial power facing widespread unrest and the threat of war, and effectively established a regime of martial law.
[8] Police and military officers were given authority, on the basis of a suspicion of a violation of a Regulation, to search any place or person and seize any object.
[4] Although emergency regulation were first introduced in response to Arab rebellion, they were also used against Jewish militant organizations like the Irgun and to fight illegal immigration of Jews.
[13][2] The Regulations were used against Jews a few times in the early state, for example in order to abolish the underground group Lehi in the wake of the Bernadotte assassination, but their primary use has been against Arabs.
In 1951 the Knesset directed the Constitution, Law, and Justice Committee to draft a bill for their repeal; however, this was not enacted, as the military government was still in force.
[14] After the cancellation of military rule in 1966, a committee was established to draw up a plan to repeal the regulations, but its work was halted by the Six-Day War.
The provisions of the Regulations most frequently applied in the occupied territories are those dealing with censorship, address restriction, detention, and deportation, and closure of areas.