Israel’s 75% graphic warnings: do they reach a nicotine pouch?

In the summer of 2026 a wave of coverage reported that Israel now requires graphic warning images on all smoking and nicotine products, including nicotine pouches, covering at least 75% of the pack. If that were right it would be the most demanding pack rule in our database, and a can built for Europe could not be sold in Israel at all. It is worth getting right rather than repeating.

The regulations are real

תקנות איסור פרסומת והגבלת השיווק של מוצרי טבק ועישון (אזהרת בריאות), תשפ״ה-2025 were signed on 29 June 2025, published on 2 July 2025 and have applied since 2 August 2026, after a 13-month run-in. They require a combined health warning of at least 75% of each of the two widest sides of the pack as it is closed, divided 50% image, 30% verbal message, 20% cessation referral, in Hebrew and Arabic, in named typefaces, rotated annually between two series.

Then read the First Schedule

Regulation 3 does not apply the warning to everything. It applies the combined warning “as set out in column B of the First Schedule, according to the type of smoking product in column A” — and column A is a list:

• cigarettes, rolling tobacco, filters and papers;
• heated tobacco, pipe, and any smoking product not of a type listed in the other items;
• hookah and hookah tobacco;
• טבק ללעיסה, הרחה או מציצה — tobacco for chewing, snuffing or sucking.

Item 4 is the one that looks like our product and is not: it is oral tobacco — snus. Item 2’s catch-all is wider, but it only reaches a מוצר עישון, a “smoking product”, and that term is defined in the parent act.

The definition is where it ends

Under the Restriction on Advertising and Marketing of Tobacco and Smoking Products Law, 5743-1983, a מוצר עישון is a tobacco product; plant material intended to be smoked by combustion; an article used for smoking tobacco or such material, including rolling papers; or an electronic cigarette with its cartridges and refill liquids.

An oral nicotine pouch containing no tobacco is none of those four. It is not smoked, it is not burned, it is not an article for smoking something else, and it is not an e-cigarette. On the better reading, the 75% regime does not reach it — and the reports that said the rules cover “nicotine pouches” were describing oral tobacco.

What this means for your artwork

• If your pouch is tobacco-free, you do not need a 75% graphic warning for Israel, and a European pack is not shut out of the market.
• If your pouch contains tobacco, it is a different product in Israeli law and the 75% regime applies to it in full.
• What does apply to a tobacco-free pouch is ordinary consumer and food labelling — principally the official standard ת”י 1145 on labelling of prepacked food, which is mandatory but is sold rather than published by the Standards Institution, together with the freely published צו הגנת הצרכן (סימון ואריזה של מוצרי מזון) and the nutrition-labelling regulations. Expect Hebrew.

How sure is this, and what would change it

We read the 2025 regulations in full, including the First Schedule. We read the definition of מוצר עישון in consolidated texts of the 1983 act rather than in Reshumot itself, so we hold this as a strong reading and not as settled law — confirm it with an Israeli adviser before a print run. The single change that would reverse it is an amendment adding tobacco-free nicotine products to the act’s definition or to the regulations’ First Schedule, and that is what we watch for this market.