Israel’s parliament approved a bill on Monday that would allow the execution of Palestinians convicted on terror charges for deadly attacks, a move that has been criticised as discriminatory and immediately drew a court challenge.
Sixty-two lawmakers, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, voted in favour and 48 against the bill, championed by far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir.
There was one abstention and the rest of the lawmakers were not present.
Ben Gvir in the run-up to the vote had worn a lapel pin in the shape of a noose, symbolising his support for the legislation.
“We made history!!! We promised. We delivered,” he posted on X after the vote.
The bill would make the death penalty the default punishment for Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank found guilty of intentionally carrying out deadly attacks deemed “acts of terrorism” by an Israeli military court.
The bill says that the sentence may be reduced to life imprisonment under “special circumstances”.
Palestinians in the West Bank are automatically tried in Israeli military courts.
The Council of Europe said the adoption of the law “respresents a serious regression.”
In contrast, the United States said Monday it respected “Israel’s sovereign right to determine its own laws and penalties for individuals convicted of terrorism.”
“We trust that any such measures will be carried out with a fair trial and respect for all applicable fair trial guarantees and protections,” a State Department spokesperson said.
Under the bill, in Israeli criminal courts anyone “who intentionally causes the death of a person with the aim of harming an Israeli citizen or resident out of an intention to put an end to the existence of the State of Israel shall be sentenced to death or life imprisonment”.
Criminal courts try Israeli nationals, including Palestinian citizens and residents of east Jerusalem.
The bill sets the execution method as hanging, adding that it should be carried out within 90 days of the sentencing, with a possible postponement of up to 180 days.
– ‘Parallel tracks’ –
The bill appears to conflict with Israel’s Basic Laws, which prohibit arbitrary discrimination, and shortly after it was passed, a leading human rights group announced that it had filed a petition with the Supreme Court demanding the legislation’s annulment.
“The law creates two parallel tracks, both designed to apply to Palestinians,” the Association for Civil Rights in Israel said in a statement.
“In military courts — which have jurisdiction over West Bank Palestinians — it establishes a near-mandatory death sentence,” the rights group said.
In civilian courts, the law’s stipulation that defendants must have acted “with the aim of negating the existence” of Israel “structurally excludes Jewish perpetrators”, the group added.
The association argued the law should be annulled on both jurisdictional and constitutional grounds.
Miriam Azem, international advocacy coordinator at the rights group Adalah, said the law would compound abuses of Palestinians, which have increased since the war in Gaza broke out.
“While there are many arguments that will be brought forward for the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court has shown that it has quite a bit of tolerance to human rights violations when it comes to Palestinians,” Azem told AFP.
“If the court fails to intervene in this, then that would be truly a testament to where the Israeli judiciary is at.”
During the debate in parliament, opposition lawmaker and former deputy Mossad director Ram Ben Barak expressed outrage at the legislation.
“Do you understand what it means that there is one law for Arabs in Judea and Samaria, and a different law for the general public for which the State of Israel is responsible?” he asked fellow parliamentarians, using the using the Biblical term for the West Bank.
“It says that Hamas has defeated us. It has defeated us because we have lost all our values.”
– ‘Discriminatory application’ –
Lawmaker Limor Son Har-Melech from Ben Gvir’s party, who years ago survived an attack by Palestinian militants in which her husband was killed, urged fellow parliamentarians to approve the bill.
“For years, we endured a cruel cycle of terror, imprisonment, release in reckless deals, and the return of these human monsters to murder Jews again… And today, my friends, this cycle has come full circle.”
The Palestinian Authority condemned the law’s adoption, saying that “Israel has no sovereignty over Palestinian land”.
“This law once again reveals the nature of the Israeli colonial system, which seeks to legitimise extrajudicial killing under legislative cover,” it added.
Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas said the law reflected Israel’s approach based on “killing and terrorism”.
On Sunday, Britain, France, Germany and Italy expressed “deep concern” over the bill, which they said risked “undermining Israel’s commitments with regards to democratic principles”.
While the death penalty exists for a small number of crimes in Israel, it has become a de facto abolitionist country — the Nazi Holocaust perpetrator Adolf Eichmann was the last person to be executed in 1962.
Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967 and violence there has soared since Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel triggered the Gaza war.
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© Agence France-Presse
