TEL AVIV — The Israeli parliament voted Monday to make death by hanging the default penalty for Palestinians from the West Bank who are convicted of killing someone in a terrorist act, a significant push to expand capital punishment in a country where it has been practically abolished.
Although the death penalty exists in Israeli law as a potential sentence for genocide, wartime espionage and certain terrorism offenses, it has not been imposed since the 1962 execution of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. In its 78-year history, Israel has executed two convicts.
The new law contains provisions mandating execution by hanging within 90 days of sentencing and allows the prime minister to request a delay of up to 180 days. It also allows an option of imposing a life sentence instead of death, but only in “special circumstances.” Those circumstances were not defined in the bill.
“From today, every terrorist will know, and the whole world will know, that whoever takes a life, the State of Israel will take their life,” National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir told lawmakers before the vote Monday.
The legislation, championed by Ben-Gvir’s right-wing Jewish Power party, is due to take effect in 30 days — if it survives legal challenges. It applies differently in the criminal courts that try Israeli citizens and the military courts of the West Bank that try Palestinians.
Critics, including opposition lawmakers, rights advocates, academics and some foreign governments, quickly condemned it as discriminatory.
“Such laws and measures will not break the will of the Palestinian people or undermine their steadfastness,” Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, said in a statement. “Nor will they deter them from continuing their legitimate struggle for freedom, independence, and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.”
The death penalty is legal under the laws of the Palestinian Authority as well as in most countries of the Middle East surrounding Israel. The European Union, where the death penalty is banned in its 27 member countries, condemned the Israeli legislation.
“The European Union opposes capital punishment in all cases and under all circumstances,” the bloc’s foreign policy arm said in a statement. “The death penalty is a violation of the right to life and cannot be executed without violation of the absolute right to be free from torture and other ill-treatment. Capital punishment also has no proven deterrent effect and renders any judicial errors irreversible.”
In a statement Sunday, the foreign ministers of Britain, France, Germany and Italy expressed “deep concern” and said: “We are particularly worried about the de facto discriminatory character of the bill.”
In Israel, opponents of the measure said they would fight to have it overturned.
The legislation is “not Jewish, not democratic, and also not effective in terms of security,” said Gilad Kariv, a Knesset member of the opposition Democrats party. It’s “drafted in such a way,” he wrote on X, “that, in practice, a Jewish terrorist such as Baruch Goldstein would not be sentenced to death.” Goldstein massacred 29 Palestinians praying at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron in 1994.
Within minutes of the legislation’s passage, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel said it had petitioned the Supreme Court to repeal it.
Lawmakers voted 62-48 to “establish the death penalty for terrorists who committed murderous acts of terror as a means of combating terrorism” and “increasing deterrence.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was among those who voted in favor. The bill targets acts intended to “negate the existence of the State of Israel.”
“This is the filter through which the legislator exempts all Jewish terrorists from the death penalty,” said Michael Sfard, an Israeli attorney who specializes in international human rights law. “In the U.S., studies show the death penalty is imposed disproportionately on Black defendants compared to White defendants. … In Israel, not only are they not concerned by the discriminatory nature of the punishment, they are anchoring it in legislation.”
Amichai Cohen, a senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, said, “It is completely clear that the law in its current version will not apply to Jews. It will likely apply only to Arabs.”
An early version of the legislation mandated the death penalty for West Bank residents convicted of “murderous acts of terror.” But it was amended, reportedly following intervention by Netanyahu, to grant the military courts there the discretion to impose life imprisonment if they find “special circumstances.”
Netanyahu’s office reportedly told Ben-Gvir last month that Israel could not enact a law more severe than those in the United States, the news site Ynet reported.
Current military law in the West Bank allows for the death penalty only if a three-judge panel agrees unanimously. Under the new legislation, it can be imposed by a simple majority. It stipulates that a military commander may not commute a death sentence — a violation, Cohen said, of Israel’s obligations under the Fourth Geneva Convention.
The bill will not apply retroactively to militants in Israeli custody accused of attacking the country on Oct. 7, 2023. Lawmakers are considering a separate bill to address their punishment.
Legal and security specialists, including two former chiefs of the Israeli intelligence agency Shin Bet, told the committee that drafted the legislation that the death penalty doesn’t deter militants, many of whom assume they “will not return alive from the attack.” In a letter to the National Security Committee, they said the legislation would “gravely harm the security of the State of Israel and its citizens” and constitutes a “severe deviation from the norms accepted in Israel since its inception and accepted in the vast majority of democratic regimes worldwide.”
“A state that erects gallows in its squares,” they said, “scars the collective soul and loses its moral high ground.”
The other convict executed by Israel was Meir Tobianski, an Israel Defense Forces officer who was court-martialed in 1948 for treason and shot to death by a firing squad. The allegation that he was a spy against Israel was subsequently proved false, and he was exonerated posthumously. His execution could explain Israeli opposition to capital punishment, Cohen said.
John Demjanjuk, accused of being the notorious Treblinka death camp guard Ivan the Terrible in Nazi Germany, was sentenced to death in 1988 for war crimes, but the conviction was overturned on appeal for reasonable doubt.
Sfard said Israel was committing “a multidimensional violation of its obligations under international human rights law. Because it is a discriminatory law by definition, because we are expanding the application of the death penalty, and because we are preventing the possibility of a pardon.”
It’s unclear when or whether the Supreme Court will review the law. “There are many problematic elements,” Cohen said. “But the court might say, ‘Let’s wait and see what happens in practice.’”
Sfard said the court faces a dilemma. “On one hand,” he said, “the law violates basic principles of the rule of law. On the other hand, if they intervene, the court will be accused of aiding the Nukhba,” Hamas’s elite forces.
The Palestinian ambassador to the League of Arab States, Muhannad Al-Aklouk, called for an emergency meeting to discuss the Israeli law.
Palestinian Authority Deputy President Hussein al-Sheikh condemned the law, calling it “a blatant challenge to international humanitarian law and international legitimacy and a racist legislation.” He urged the international community “to act to protect Palestinian prisoners.”
Siham Shamalakh in Cairo contributed to this report.
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