The cheap celebrations added to the cruelty of the declaration. Champagne corks popped amid loud cheers and tears of joy as Israel’s Knesset passed a death penalty law that applies exclusively to Palestinian detainees and not Jewish Israelis.
It is a brazen codification of a racial hierarchy that far surpasses even the excesses of apartheid South Africa.
“It doesn't matter if it's by injection, poison, or rope; what's important is a death penalty for terrorists law. 'So that the Jews shall rule over their enemies [Esther 9:1]',” declared the Knesset Deputy Speaker, Limor Son Har-Melech , who drafted the law.
“[The prison service] already started ordering red uniforms, they’re opening a death row wing,” Israeli Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir - himself a convicted terrorist - announced with a gleeful ear-to-ear smile. The world's most extreme death penalty law The United Nations promptly denounced Israel’s new death penalty law as a “war crime,” while Amnesty International labelled it as “one of the world’s most extreme death penalty laws”.
When taking into account its discriminatory nature, arbitrary application, and racist core premise, Israel’s death penalty law is unprecedented in the 21st Century, even among the world’s worst dictatorships, for six simple reasons.
First, under the new Israeli law, capital punishment would be the default sentence for any Palestinian accused of causing the death of an Israeli, including in cases framed as “reckless” rather than intentional killing.
Second, the death penalty law entails two safeguards to ensure it would never be applied against Jewish Israelis while being arbitrarily used against Palestinians. These include that any killing is with the “intention of negating the existence of the State of Israel,” and that issuing a death sentence is in the hands of Israeli military courts, where no Jewish Israelis have ever been tried.
This puts Israel in an even darker place than apartheid South Africa, as Dr Mustafa Barghouti put it, since even Afrikaners “did not dare to say that if a black man kills a white man, he will be executed. But if a white man kills a black man, he will not be”.
Third, Israeli military courts have a conviction rate against Palestinians of 99.74%, the highest worldwide, while the conviction rate of reported Israeli settler attacks on Palestinians is less than 1.8% .
The indictment rate of Israeli soldiers for attacks on Palestinians is even lower, at about 0.87%. Since the start of the year, there have been eight separate incidents where Israeli settlers have killed Palestinians in broad daylight without a single one of those settlers being charged.
Military courts in Israel are also notorious for disregarding due process and fair trial safeguards, and denying Palestinians any course of appeal. Those courts have consistently allowed for the indefinite detention of Palestinians, including activists or political leaders, without trial, charges, or conviction, under what is known as administrative detention. That is why legal experts have long called Israel’s judicial system for Palestinians “kangaroo courts” that disregard recognised legal procedures and human rights to deliver pre-determined, unfair verdicts.
Fourth, Israel’s death penalty law would lead to the execution of Palestinians within only 90 days of a court ruling, and would restrict access to legal counsel or family visits. This prompted Amnesty to call it a “carte blanche to execute Palestinians”. For comparison, the average time in Iran between arrest and execution for convicted prisoners is one to seven years.
Fifth, the new Israeli law goes well beyond an alleged killer to include “any planner or sender”. This means incriminating a chain of individuals on flimsy allegations of “sending” Palestinians to carry out armed attacks on Israel.
Israeli military courts have already used this argument to sentence Marwan Barghouti , the ‘Palestinian Mandela,’ to over 500 years in prison. Israel never accused Barghouti of directly using violence, but instead alleged that he was involved in planning or sending Palestinians to carry out 37 attacks or attempted attacks on Israel.
Barghouti has long advocated for peace between Israel and Palestinians and the two-state solution, and has outright condemned the killing of civilians. None of the 21 witnesses Israel summoned for Marwan’s sham trial ever accused him of being involved in violent attacks, and 12 of them explicitly told the court he was never involved.
In fact, Israeli leaders, like former Shin Bet chief Ami Ayalon, admitted that Barghouti “is the only leader who can lead Palestinians to a state alongside Israel,” which is precisely why Israel keeps him locked up .
Israel’s new death penalty law would now allow for the summary execution of Palestinians like Barghouti by merely claiming they took part in “planning or sending” someone who carries out an alleged violent attack.
Sixth, under the Fourth Geneva Convention, an occupying power cannot impose capital offences unless those offences were also punishable by death under the law of the occupied territory.
The State of Palestine ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) in 2014 and its Second Optional Protocol aiming at the abolition of the death penalty (ICCPR-OP2) in 2019. The PA has carried out no executions since 2002. A racist law drafted by extremists and supporters of terrorism Israel’s death penalty law, purported to target terrorists, was drafted by some of Israel’s most prominent supporters or perpetrators of extremist violence against Palestinians.
Limor Son Har-Melech, who co-authored the law, has a long history of glorifying violence against Palestinians and is one of the top leaders of the movement for rebuilding Jewish-only settlements in Gaza. Old footage of her surfaced in 2023 in which she was asking her toddler son, “What do you want to do when you grow up?” When her son answers, “a soldier to go in a jeep and kill the Arabs,” she hugs him and says, “excellent”.
Har-Melech fundraised $120,000 in 2023 for the convicted Israeli Amiram Ben Uliel , whose 2015 arson attack killed a Palestinian baby and his parents. She visited him in prison and called him “holy,” “righteous,” “innocent,” “so beautiful in my eyes” and “suffering for all the people of Israel”.
Her spokesman in the same year was Elisha Yered, a “Hilltop Youth” activist who was arrested in 2023 as a prime suspect in the murder of a Palestinian teenager, and was later sanctioned by Canada and Singapore for extreme violent activities.
Har-Melech’s close colleague is MK Zvi Sukkot, who was himself arrested on suspicion of burning a mosque. In 2024, he filmed himself entering the room of a hospitalised Palestinian and threatening that "we will make sure you are killed".
Sukkot also rioted and led the storming of an Israeli military base in support of the six soldiers who were briefly detained for raping a Palestinian detainee on camera.
Israel’s Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who is in charge of implementing this law, has himself been convicted on at least eight charges, including supporting a terrorist organisation and incitement to racism. His criminal record is so long that when he appeared before a judge, “we had to change the ink on the printer,” according to a former Shin Bet official.
Ben-Gvir had long put up a portrait in his living room of Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish terrorist and mass murderer who committed the Ibrahimi Mosque massacre in 1994. The Israeli minister reportedly first met his current wife while both were visiting Goldstein’s grave.
In 2015, Ben Gvir was filmed partying with extremist Israeli settlers at a wedding in which they stabbed and burned a picture of a Palestinian baby and danced around it with machine guns and Molotov cocktails. Legalising a de facto policy “The death penalty further legalises what already exists. What comes as a shock is the fact that it’s instituted. It’s yet another brick in the very tall and very old wall of apartheid,” Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, said on Saturday .
This was exemplified by opposition MK Miki Levy , who bragged last week that he once “ordered the shooting of a terrorist whose hands were tied behind his back”.
Israel has long had a policy of “taking no prisoners”, as B’Tselem put it in 2005 , where the Israeli army would first shoot to kill Palestinians suspected of taking part in armed resistance groups instead of arresting them.
In 2004 alone, Israel killed 89 Palestinians during “arrest operations”, including 43 who were unarmed and at least 17 who “were not wanted by Israel, but were civilians who were not suspected by Israel of having committed any offence”.
In the occupied territory, Israel has a long practice of preventing any medical aid from being provided to Palestinians shot by the Israeli army and instead forcing those victims to bleed to death, as a way of extrajudicial execution rather than taking them prisoner.
For instance, in 2020, Israeli soldiers shot Ahmad Erekat six times while he was on his way to his sister’s wedding. The soldiers then denied Ahmad any medical aid and prevented people nearby from helping him until he died.
The new death penalty law ensures that if a Palestinian somehow survives Israel’s “take no prisoners” tactic of extrajudicial execution and denial of medical aid, they would still be murdered after being put on a sham trial. Crown jewel of Israel's genocide During the genocide in Gaza, a popular Israeli song was added by soldiers to videos of them burning Palestinian homes and flattening entire neighbourhoods. The lyrics were “To destroy, to kill, to expel, to deport. To eliminate, to extradite, death penalty, no fear. To annihilate, to cause extinction, to eradicate, to exterminate.”
Israel’s new capital punishment law now completes the pillars of that genocidal anthem. Institutionalising the death penalty ensures Israel’s ability to kill Palestinians, even if they surrender, cooperate, turn themselves in, and enter Israeli custody.
This is why Israeli MK Ofer Cassif described the new legislation as “the Genocide law”. Cassif said, “The people who proposed the law… say explicitly that all Palestinians are terrorists, if not at present, in potential. The chair of the interior committee at the Knesset said explicitly and literally… that there aren’t any innocent people in Jenin”.
He added, “That means again that all Palestinians are terrorists. And if this law says that terrorists should be executed and all Palestinians are regarded by them as terrorists, that means, in other words, logically speaking, that all Palestinians should be executed. That’s not a death penalty law, that is a genocide law”.
In other words, the law is not about individual guilt; it is a machinery for group annihilation dressed in procedural language. A state that writes execution into law for only one people has stopped pretending that justice was ever the point.
It is not an aberration, but the logical culmination of a genocidal logic that has been broadcast in Israeli soldiers’ anthems and in the smile of a minister convicted of terrorism as he orders red uniforms for a new death row wing.
Israel has now enshrined into law what its courts have long delivered in practice: a system where Palestinian life carries no presumption of innocence, no right to appeal, and soon, no right to breathe. Muhammad Shehada is a Palestinian writer and analyst from Gaza and the EU Affairs Manager at Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor Follow him on Twitter: @muhammadshehad2 Edited by Charlie Hoyle