Israelis unite behind death penalty for Palestinians

On March 30, Israel passed a death penalty law intended solely for Palestinians, expanding the use of capital punishment in both military and civilian courts. The law was promoted by hardline Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the standard bearer of Israel’s far-right and the head of the Jewish Power party. On May 17, it was signed into effect by Israel’s military chief of Central Command, Avi Bluth, to apply to West Bank Palestinians.  

But the death penalty law was only the beginning. Since then, an avalanche of legislation has been pushed through the Israeli legal and political system that significantly expands the state’s sanctioning of death for Palestinians.

The most recent of these subsequent laws was passed on May 11, and related specifically to Palestinians suspected of any degree of involvement in the events that transpired on October 7 and its immediate aftermath (legally framed as October 7 to October 10, 2023). 

This new law, considered a twin to the first, is arguably more radical: it applies retroactively, and permits convictions on an extremely lenient evidentiary basis. This includes “evidence” gathered under conditions of torture, which, according to numerous reports, is a systemic feature of Israeli prisons, described by B’Tselem as “a network of torture camps.”

The law was approved with a consensus of 93 to 0, encompassing virtually the entire Zionist political spectrum.

Loose standards of evidence 

It’s worth lingering on just how lenient the law’s evidentiary basis is. Former region south prosecutor Moran Gez admitted in a January 2025 interview with Ynet that “the biggest difficulty is evidentiary” when referring to the events of October 7, since “using evidence to link a specific crime to a specific defendant when dealing with dozens of crime scenes, where hundreds of suspects were caught and thousands of offenses were committed, is almost impossible.”

But the new law doesn’t need to follow any of these evidentiary rules, “including instructions concerning the study of investigation materials, chain of capture and passing of evidence,” and the acceptance of written claims compared against witness confessions when the prosecution is convinced that it “will not substantially harm the fairness of the process.” 

The qualification of “fairness” cannot even veil the unfairness of the premise. The entire framing strips away the context of occupation and regards any participation in the attacks as motivated by a hate for Jews. This definition was already cemented last year in a law against the “denial of the October 7 massacre events,” where any “identification” with the acts entails 5 years of imprisonment.  

The declared purpose of the current law thus repeats and elaborates that framing, encompassing “the prosecution of those who committed the acts of terror, murder, sexual crimes, kidnapping and looting” committed by Hamas “and its accomplices.”

The inclusion of “looting” in the list of crimes is not coincidental. And each of them, when taken as part of a whole, constitutes “crimes against the Jewish People, crimes against humanity, and war crimes,” according to the law’s text.

Gez was unequivocal in her prior advocacy for including any suspected participant in the events of that day, asserting that “anyone who entered Israel from Gaza on October 7 to kill or to loot, it doesn’t matter, should be included in the indictment and, as far as I’m concerned, receive the death penalty.” 

She further elaborated: “Why? Because of those who didn’t murder but looted, burned, stole, picked avocados, as some claim, because of this mess, the Israeli army forces were unable to arrive in time. You came to the door with a drill and opened it to loot? Then a terrorist came in and murdered civilians there.”

Let that sink in: an illegally occupied people who may have been completely unrelated to the planning and execution of the attack, but who crossed the fence to pick avocados on that day, were participants in a “genocide” against the Jewish people, as the events of October 7 are commonly characterized in Israeli media. 

There is a collective aspect to the law that allows collective indictments. One of its most important aspects is that it withdraws the possibility of a person being freed in a prisoner exchange if they are “suspected, indicted, or convicted of an offense committed within the October 7 massacre events.” 

And what befalls those “suspected” of participation? Their trial can be decided without even the defendant’s presence (under “normal” conditions, defendants can appear at their hearings via video call from their torture camps). As for the decision to give them the death penalty, it can be made by a simple majority of two out of three judges appointed by the military’s Chief of Staff, doing away with the previous practice of requiring unanimity among the judges. 

An appetite for ‘show trials‘

The trials themselves are sanctioned to be public and filmed, designed as a kind of public horror show.

This is what Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, described when it said that the legislation “subordinates every principle of fair criminal justice to a punitive and retributive spectacle,” replacing a genuine judicial inquiry with “state-sanctioned ‘show trials’,” Adalah lawyer Muna Haddad told The New Arab.

The appetite for this kind of spectacle has been building for years. In early 2024, mainstream Israeli television channels aired footage from detention facilities, with officials boasting about the treatment of detainees. Around the same time, the Israeli army brought civilians into those facilities to watch and film the torture of Palestinians live, including nude torture. Death, it seems, is the logical endpoint of that public desire. 

A part of this public appetite is fueled by a wide-ranging desire to “enter the history books” for putting “the Nazis of the modern era” on trial, as recently stated by Israeli lawmaker Yulia Malinovsky from the Israel Beitenu opposition party.

Malinovsky’s party leader, the great liberal Avigdor Lieberman, has in the past suggested that Palestinians who express disloyalty to Israel be decapitated with an axe, and that Palestinian prisoners be drowned collectively in the Dead Sea. 

But now, Malinovsky has found an enlightened way to realize these goals: through “a lawful court procedure, filmed and broadcast.” 

The broadcasting aspect isn’t an incidental afterthought either. The Israeli Knesset voted on June 2 to allocate NIS 86 million ($29 million) to the tribunal infrastructure in 2026 — including broadcasting systems — NIS 359 million ($121 million) in 2027, NIS 307 million ($104.6 million) in 2028, and then an annual NIS 262 million ($89 million) from 2029 onwards. 

For such a sizeable public investment, the Israeli public will want its money’s worth.