This present work done on the adsorption isotherm study for the removal of Cu (II) and Ni (II) ions from aqueous solution using industrial zinc oxide nanoparticles. Various techniques such as AFM, XRD and FT_IR were employed to characterize the surface. From the XRD analysis, each reflection peak with the relative intensity of different planes confirmed the presence of ZnO and the spectrum revealed that the particles size was about (27.43 nm ), which is in good agreement with those estimated from AFM and mean that the particle diameters are in the nanometer range. Adsorption experiments were studied to investigate the effect of contact time, adsorbent dose, initial concentration, and temperature on the adsorption capacity. The equilibrium data were evaluated by the Langmuir, Freundlich, Elovich and Halsey models of adsorption. The removal of Cu (II) and Ni (II) by ZnO nanoparticles follows the Freundlich and Halsey isotherm which fits well with the experimental data (R 2 = 0.9718, 0.9942, 0.9525 and 0.9941 respectively). The maximum percentages of Ni (II) and Cu (II) removal were found to be above 96.03 % and 96.45 % as well. Finally , the thermodynamic parameters (∆H, ∆S, ∆G o ) were calculated and indicated that the adsorption process is exothermic , spontaneous, and less random when metal ions overlap with the commercial zinc oxide nanoparticles. The higher percentage removal at higher dosage value of ZnO could be due to an increased active sites for the adsorption of metals ions with an increased amount of adsorbent dosage.