Rights groups condemn Israeli push for death penalty for Palestinians

Israel’s government is pushing for the legal execution of Palestinians convicted of certain crimes despite the country having no death penalty. The proposed bill would not apply to Jewish Israelis convicted of the same crimes.

The bill has been supported by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during its first reading. Other supporters include Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, Defence Minister Israel Katz, former defence minister Avigdor Lieberman and prominent sponsor of the bill Limor Son Har-Melech from the Otzma Yehudit party.

Politicians from Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party and others from the Yisrael Beitenu party have also lent their support.

The Knesset, or parliament, is debating the highly controversial bill after it passed its first reading in November 2025, Deutsche Welle reported. It still has to pass a second and third reading.

UN experts have urged Israel to withdraw the bill proposing the mandatory death penalty for “terrorist acts”, which they say would violate the right to life and discriminate against Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territory.

“Only Palestinians in the West Bank, not Israeli settlers, are subject to wider criminal liability, military law and military courts, and less due process, and the death penalty in Israel and occupied East Jerusalem applies only to killings of Israeli citizens or residents and under regular Israeli criminal law,” said the experts from the UN Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner at the beginning of February.

Given the failings of the military law system that has been applied to Palestinians since 1967, the experts stressed that the risk of death sentences contravening international law was high.

“Mandatory death sentences are contrary to the right to life. By removing judicial and prosecutorial discretion, they prevent a court from considering the individual circumstances, including mitigating factors, and from imposing a proportionate sentence that fits the crime,” they said.

Military law vs criminal law

The experts explained that the bill would introduce two tracks for the death penalty. “In the Israeli-occupied Palestinian West Bank, the death penalty would be imposed by military courts under military law for ‘terrorist acts’ causing the death of a person, even if not intended,” they wrote.

“In Israel and occupied East Jerusalem, the death penalty would apply under Israeli criminal law, but only for the ‘intentional killing of Israeli citizens or residents’.”

The panel added that, under both tracks, vague and overbroad definitions of terrorist offences under Israeli law would apply, “which can include conduct that is not genuinely terrorist, and the death penalty would be mandatory”.

They further argued that because Israeli military trials of civilians typically did not meet fair trial standards under international human rights and humanitarian law, any resulting death sentence would further violate the right to life.

“The bill makes matters worse by allowing death sentences to be imposed by a simple majority vote of military judges, and banning any pardon or commutation, which expressly violates the right to life.”

Furthermore, the proposed legislation restricts access to legal counsel, fails to provide a meaningful appeal process and eliminates effective external oversight.

Amnesty International urged the Knesset to vote against the bill, saying it was moving against the global trend towards the abolition of the death penalty and instead was seeking to create new avenues for imposing death sentences.

“Rather than fast-tracking discriminatory bills that would serve as yet another tool in Israel’s institutionalised system of apartheid against all Palestinians whose rights it controls, Knesset members should immediately drop these amendments,” said Amnesty International’s senior director for research, advocacy, policy and campaigns, Erika Guevara Rosas.

Prisoner abuse

National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who also sponsored the bill, has been behind the increasingly harsh conditions under which Palestinian security prisoners and others are held, including severe beatings, food deprivation, sexual assaults and dozens of unexplained deaths, according to Israeli rights group B’Tselem.

The organisation has listed the more than 80 Palestinians who have died in Israeli detention since Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel in 2023. No details or explanations have been provided for some of these deaths.

One of the more notorious cases occurred at the notorious Sde Teiman detention centre in the Negev desert. The video was leaked to the media.

The Palestinian involved was allegedly raped with a baton by Israeli soldiers and sustained serious internal injuries necessitating hospital admission. Despite extensive international coverage, the Israeli military declined to comment. However, the person involved in releasing the video was arrested, as were the perpetrators.

The abuse of jailed Palestinians is not limited to those suspected of political crimes. According to a recent report by the Committee to Protect Journalists, dozens of Palestinian journalists have also been beaten, starved and raped in Israeli detention. The abuse has also extended to Palestinian health workers and doctors in Israeli detentions centres, Britain’s Channel 4 reported.

About 3,474 Palestinians, including children, are being held in administrative detention or detention without trial, said B’Tselem.

The Palestinian chapter of Defence of Children International said children were regularly abused or interrogated without their parents or a lawyer present. DM

This story first appeared in our weekly DM168 newspaper, available countrywide for R35.