A new independent authority to verify the origin of dates marked Palestinian has gone live ahead of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

The Palestinian Dates Monitoring Authority (PDMA) has been established to verify the authenticity of dates originating in Palestine to help consumers avoid Israeli producers that deceptively label their produce as Palestinian.

Dates are routinely mislabelled or sold without any country-of-origin information to hide their true source. Even major supermarkets such as Lidl and Aldi have been caught selling Israeli dates under misleading or missing labels. The situation is even worse among smaller retailers that cater to Muslim communities, where Israeli dates are deliberately misrepresented as Palestinian to trick consumers.

Notorious companies such as Offa Exotics source directly from Israel’s largest date exporter, Mehadrin, yet cynically market their products as Palestinian, complete with Arabic text and mosque imagery intended to mislead Muslim consumers.

After more than two years of genocide in Gaza, many people of conscience have refused to buy Israeli products. Yet, because of widespread deception and mislabelling, some now avoid Palestinian dates as well, fearing they could be Israeli in disguise. This confusion directly harms genuine Palestinian farming communities whose survival depend on the annual harvest of dates.

To date, four major brands have passed the verification process. They are: Yaffa, Zaytoun, Rift Valley Farms and Sofra (Damasgate).

As part of the verification process, each company is also required to sign a pledge affirming that it does not buy or sell any Israeli goods, not just dates. This commitment ensures that all their business remains free of complicity with apartheid.

To put the scale of the problem into perspective, the total value of all Palestinian imports to the UK in 2025 was £22 million, while Israeli date imports alone reached £24.7 million in 2024. Israeli dates account for a third of all dates imported into the UK.

The PDMA is guided by an advisory panel of experts and built on decades of grassroots research and advocacy led by the Islamic Human Rights Commission, Inminds Human Rights Group, and Resistance Kitchen. It can be accessed here pdmauk.org

In the long term, the PDMA will also be addressing the issue of mixed produce within Palestine itself, pushing for farm-level traceability and tougher safeguards.

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For more information or comment please contact the Press Office on (+44) 208 904 0222  or (+44) 7958 522196 or email media@ihrc.org
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