Israel’s Parliament passed a law on Monday that would allow the hanging of Palestinians convicted of deadly militant attacks, but experts say it almost certainly cannot be applied to Jewish extremists convicted of similar crimes.
The law is a victory for Israel’s far right and reflects the country’s shift to a harder line against Palestinians in the wake of the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the Gaza war that followed. The death penalty has long been legal in Israel, but only two people have been executed in the country’s 78-year history.
The Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, passed the law after hours of debate on Monday night over the objections of Israeli justice officials, liberal rights groups and European countries like Britain and Germany.
The legislation makes death by hanging the default sentence in Israeli military courts for Palestinians convicted of deadly attacks. Israeli citizens — both Jewish and Palestinian Arab — could also face the death penalty for killings intended to “negate the existence of the State of Israel.” Experts say, however, the chances that it would be applied to Jewish Israelis for attacks against Palestinians are minimal.
Judges will be allowed to make exceptions for unspecified circumstances. The legislation will leave those convicted in military courts with no clear path to receiving a pardon. It will not, however, apply retroactively to Palestinians already jailed by Israel.
Israel’s national doctors’ union has refused to carry out lethal injections, so those convicted will face death by hanging. Some right-wing Israeli lawmakers enthusiastically adopted the noose as a symbol of their support for the law, wearing golden noose-shaped pins on their lapels in the Knesset.
Members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition argued the law would deter future Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians, including attempts to take Israelis hostage so as to ransom the freedom of jailed Palestinian militants.
Critics in Israel and abroad denounced the measure for allowing the execution of Palestinian attackers while deliberately aiming to exclude Jewish Israeli extremists.
“By design, this legislation exclusively targets Palestinians, violating the fundamental principle of equality and prohibition on racial discrimination,” said Suhad Bishara, a lawyer with the Palestinian rights group Adalah.
Opinion polls have shown a majority of Jewish Israelis backs executing Palestinian militants, at least in principle. The law passed with muted public backlash and the support of some members of the parliamentary opposition to the government.
Israeli hard-liners, particularly Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister, campaigned during the most recent parliamentary elections on a promise to impose the death penalty on Palestinian militants.
Under the new law, Israeli civilian courts — which try both Israeli Jewish and Arab citizens — can apply the death penalty only for homicides intended to “negate the existence of the State of Israel.”
Given that, it would effectively be impossible to execute Jewish extremists like Baruch Goldstein, an Israeli settler who gunned down 29 Palestinians at a West Bank holy site in 1994, said Yoav Sapir, a former head of Israel’s public defenders office.
“The intent is clearly for the law to apply to Palestinians and not to Jewish terrorism at all,” said Mr. Sapir, now a professor at Tel Aviv University.
Left-leaning Israeli and Palestinian rights groups immediately filed petitions to annul the law with Israel’s Supreme Court, with which Mr. Netanyahu’s government has frequently clashed. The statute’s discriminatory provisions will most likely lead the court to strike it down, said Mr. Sapir.
Before the law passed, Britain, France, Italy and Germany urged lawmakers not to enact it.
“We are particularly worried about the de facto discriminatory character of the bill,” the four countries said. “The adoption of this bill would risk undermining Israel’s commitments with regards to democratic principles.”
Both the efficacy and morality of capital punishment have long been fiercely contested. Supporters often view it as the ultimate deterrent, while critics stress the risk of executing the innocent. Many Western democracies, particularly in Europe, have phased out executions in recent decades. The United States is a rare holdout, having put more than 1,000 people to death since the 1970s.
Israel has imposed the existing death penalty only twice in its history. Meir Tobianski, an Israeli Army officer accused of spying, was executed in 1948 — only to be publicly exonerated after his killing. And more than a decade later, Israel later abducted, tried and hanged Adolf Eichmann, one of the leading Nazi German officials who oversaw the Holocaust.
Israeli lawmakers frequently invoked the American practice of capital punishment when justifying the legislation. But legal experts say the new Israeli law removes many of the guardrails similar to those that exist in the United States, which aim to minimize the death penalty’s inherent risks.
Many of the Palestinians will be tried in Israeli military courts, which are part of a system that has underpinned the decades-long Israeli occupation of the West Bank. Detainees there have fewer civil rights protections and less due process than in Israel’s standard criminal justice system.
Palestinians sentenced to death in military courts will not be eligible for a pardon or a commutation of their sentence, according to several Israeli legal scholars.
The law stipulates that they must be executed within 180 days at the maximum, limiting the potential for retrials. And while most U.S. states require a unanimous jury verdict for the death penalty, the Israeli law requires only a simple majority of judges.
Supporters of the legislation also argue that by executing some Palestinian militants, Israel would reduce the incentive for armed groups like Hamas to seize Israeli hostages to use as bargaining chips to swap for Palestinian prisoners.
Hamas and its allies seized more than 250 people in the 2023 attack. In cease-fire agreements with Israel, Hamas exchanged both the surviving captives and the remains of those killed for more than 3,500 Palestinian prisoners.
“Each time we don’t use the death penalty, we are encouraging the next attempt to take hostages,” said Moshe Saada, a lawmaker from Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party who helped craft the death penalty legislation.
Asked about Jewish extremists like Mr. Goldstein, Mr. Saada said that Jewish Israeli attackers should be arrested and imprisoned. But he stopped short of saying that they could be sentenced to death under the new law.
“One cannot make the comparison,” he said. “There’s a society here that is supporting and encouraging their actions,” he added, referring to Palestinian assailants.
Thousands of Palestinians will remain in Israeli prisons regardless, providing plenty of incentive for Palestinian militants hoping to free them, said Adi Rotem, a former senior Israeli intelligence official who opposes the legislation. The few who are executed could inspire further attacks, he added.
“We could easily find ourselves in a situation where someone takes hostages and demands an impending execution be annulled. It adds another incentive to kidnap Israelis,” he argued. “Even when it comes to the worst terrorists, we have to think strategically.”
Some of the opposition to the legislation has been on Jewish religious grounds. Several ultra-Orthodox lawmakers — despite being members of Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition — opposed the law in accordance with a rabbinical ruling.
In the Jewish legal tradition, capital punishment exists but is nearly impossible to carry out, said Rabbi Benny Lau of Jerusalem, a religious scholar who opposes the law. The Talmud, the major Jewish legal text, suggested it ought to be ordered just “once in 70 years,” reflecting the gravity of the matter, he added.
“It’s clear that this is all about revenge,” said Rabbi Lau, referring to the law. “It’s a circus of violence pretending to be about security.”
Fatima AbdulKarim contributed reporting.
Aaron Boxerman is a Times reporter covering Israel and Gaza. He is based in Jerusalem.
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