Human rights groups and Palestinian leaders have condemned Israel’s passage of a law approving the use of the death penalty against Palestinians convicted of deadly attacks, calling the measure a violation of international law and inherently discriminatory.
The legislation, passed on Monday by Israel’s Parliament, the Knesset, makes the death penalty by hanging the default punishment for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank who have been found guilty of killing Israelis.
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It was championed by far-right Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who was seen celebrating with champagne in the parliamentary chamber after the law was passed with 62 votes to 48.
“We made history,” Ben-Gvir wrote in a social media post rejecting international calls to withdraw the legislation. “And I say to the people of the European Union who have applied pressure and threatened the State of Israel: We are not afraid, we will not submit,” he said.
The legislation comes amid a surge in Israeli military and settler attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank, as well as thousands of arrests, in the shadow of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. The Association for Civil Rights in Israel said it had filed an appeal against the law with Israel’s Supreme Court.
Here’s a quick look at how rights advocates and leaders have reacted to the death penalty law:
Palestinian Authority
The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs condemned the legislation as a “dangerous escalation”.
In a social media post, the ministry stressed that “Israel has no sovereignty over Palestinian land” in the occupied territory.
“This law once again reveals the nature of the Israeli colonial system, which seeks to legitimise extrajudicial killing under legislative cover,” it said.
Hamas
The Palestinian group slammed the passage of the death penalty law as a “dangerous precedent that threatens the lives” of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.
“This decision reaffirms the [Israeli] occupation and its leaders’ contempt for international law and their disregard for all humanitarian norms and conventions,” Hamas said in a statement.
The group called on the international community, including the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross, to take immediate action to protect Palestinian prisoners from Israel’s “brutality”.
Mustafa Barghouti, Palestinian National Initiative secretary-general
Barghouti warned of the “seriousness” of the legislation, which he said would target Palestinian political prisoners and activists.
In a post on X, he also said that “proposing such an unjust and inhuman law reflects the depth of the fascist shift within the Israeli system, amid the international community’s failure to impose punitive measures against it”.
Palestinian Centre for Human Rights
The Gaza-based rights organisation said it condemned the law “in the strongest terms”.
“This law targets Palestinians and entrenches Israel’s long-standing policy of extrajudicial execution under the guise of law, in clear violation of international human rights and humanitarian law,” the PCHR said in a social media post.
The group called on the international community “to urgently intervene” in defence of Palestinian prisoners, while warning that “silence and inaction will only further deepen impunity and erode the rules-based international order”.
UN Human Rights Office
The UN Human Rights Office in Palestine called on Israel to “immediately repeal the discriminatory death penalty law”, noting that the measure violates the country’s obligations under international law.
“The United Nations opposes the death penalty under all circumstances. The implementation of this new law would violate international law’s prohibition of cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment,” the office said on X.
“Additionally, this law further entrenches Israel’s violation of the prohibition of racial segregation and apartheid as it will exclusively apply to Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Israel, who are often convicted after unfair trials.”
Amnesty International
The global human rights group called on the Israeli authorities to repeal the law, which it described as “a public display of cruelty, discrimination and utter contempt for human rights”.
Erika Guevara-Rosas, Amnesty International’s senior director of research, advocacy, policy and campaigns, noted that the law’s passage comes just weeks after Israel dropped all charges against soldiers accused of sexually assaulting a Palestinian detainee.
“For years, we have seen an alarming pattern of apparent extrajudicial executions and other unlawful killings of Palestinians – with the perpetrators also enjoying near-total impunity,” Guevara-Rosas said in a statement.
“This new law which allows for state-sanctioned executions is a culmination of such policies.”
Council of Europe
Alain Berset, secretary-general of the Council of Europe, denounced the law’s passage as a “serious regression”.
“The death penalty is a legal anachronism incompatible with contemporary human-rights standards. Moreover, any application of the death penalty that could be characterised as discriminatory is unacceptable in a state governed by the rule of law,” Berset said in a statement.
He also noted that Israel is a party to several Council of Europe conventions and participates in several cooperation mechanisms.
“In this context, the Council of Europe will closely monitor upcoming developments regarding this law. It will examine its implications for the Council of Europe conventions to which Israel is a party, as well as for the cooperation mechanisms in which this state participates,” Berset said.
Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani
In a social media post just hours before the law was officially passed, Tajani said that Italy, Germany, France and the United Kingdom had requested that the Israeli government withdraw the bill.
“The commitments undertaken, especially with the resolutions voted on at the United Nations, for a moratorium on the death penalty cannot be disregarded,” Tajani wrote on X.
“For us, life is an absolute value; arrogating to oneself the right to take it away in order to inflict a punishment is an inhuman measure that violates the dignity of the person.”
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