Israel establishes special tribunal to livestream ‘show’ trials for October 7 detainees

Israel’s Knesset passed a law on Monday establishing a special military tribunal in Jerusalem to try Palestinian fighters accused of participating in the Operation Al-Aqsa Flood against Israeli settlements in the Gaza envelope. The legislation grants the court the power to issue death sentences and bars those convicted from being released under any future prisoner exchange agreements. It stipulates that the trial proceedings will all be available to the public through a live broadcast link. Ninety-three of the 120 Knesset members voted in favor of the bill, with no votes against. Around 300 detainees accused of involvement in the October 7 attack, whom Israel categorizes as “elite fighters,” are currently held in remand detention subject to routine renewal. Alaa Skafy, the head of Al-Dameer Association for Human Rights, told Mada Masr that the law could still face constitutional challenges before Israel’s Supreme Court, which could lead to its suspension, amendment or annulment. Before taking effect, the legislation must be signed by the Israeli president and published in the state’s official gazette. Those detained are expected to face charges including for genocide, harming Israeli sovereignty, causing war,  assisting an enemy during a time of war and terrorism-related offenses. Defendants charged under Israel’s 1950 genocide prevention law will be liable to a death penalty. Skafy described invoking the 1950 law as a continuation of Israeli efforts to legitimize exceptional trials for the detainees held in relation to October 7. According to him, the legislation forms part of Israel’s ongoing attempt to strip Palestinian detainees of prisoner-of-war status and reclassify them as “unlawful combatants,” thereby circumventing protections afforded by the Geneva Conventions. Skafy contrasted the law with amendments passed to Israel’s penal code passed in late March, which mandates the death penalty for Palestinian prisoners from Gaza, the West Bank and Israel convicted of fatal attacks on Israelis labelled as “terrorism.” According to both Skafy and Hassan Abady, a lawyer specializing in Palestinian prisoner cases in Israeli courts, convictions could rest solely on confessions extracted under threat or torture, without due process or evidence substantiating the accusations. The fact that military judges would preside over the trials creates what Abady described as “a preconceived bias” against the accused. Fathy Nimr, a policy fellow in the Palestinian policy network Al-Shabaka, told Mada Masr that the military court system, where conviction rates exceed 99 percent, lacks even the bare minimum standards of integrity. Cases, he said, are routinely built on anonymous confessions extracted under torture in detention centers under opaque conditions. Under the bill, hearings would take place in a courtroom in Jerusalem while detainees would remain inside prisons and detention centers rather than appearing physically before the court. Skafy described the arrangement as a “challenge to international will through the practice of organized terror and thuggery against detainees.” He said the law grants sweeping powers to political and security authorities, amounting to a serious erosion of judicial independence and fair trial guarantees. Israeli politicians and lawmakers backing the bill described the tribunals enabled by the legislation as a “modern Eichmann trial,” a reference to the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in 1961, which was the last time the death penalty was applied by an Israeli court. Nimr argued that Israel invokes terms such as “genocide” and “Nazism” judicially in order to lend moral legitimacy to retaliatory measures while staging the trials as a show for domestic Israeli consumption. This political instrumentalization of historical memory, he said, seeks to legitimize the persecution of people living under military rule by portraying resistance as a “Nazi” act warranting eradication. “We’ve seen this very clearly throughout history and over the past decades,” he added. In this context, law becomes “a tool of war,” he said, providing cover for ethnic cleansing and allowing the colonial state to evade accountability for its crimes under the banner of “law enforcement” and security. The special courts the law establishes, Nimr argued, are little more than a “judicial circus” designed to provide legal cover for the execution of Palestinians outside the bounds of justice. In a statement on Tuesday, Hamas described the law as a dangerous escalation and “a new crime added to the Occupation’s long record of war crimes and systematic violations.” “It really feels like the world has been turned upside down,” Nimr said. “The state that is actually carrying out genocide is accusing people living under military rule of wanting to commit genocide.” The post Israel establishes special tribunal to livestream ‘show’ trials for October 7 detainees first appeared on Mada Masr .