Israel Passes Discriminatory Death Penalty Law Targeting Palestinians

Israel’s Knesset passed a law on Monday, making death by hanging the default sentence for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank convicted of deadly terrorist attacks against Israelis, with the bill approved by a 62-48 vote.

The law, championed by Jewish supremacist and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, applies to military courts in the West Bank and mandates execution within 90 days of sentencing, with no right to clemency, though life imprisonment may be imposed in “special circumstances.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who had previously expressed reservations, personally attended the session and voted in favor, calling it a fulfillment of coalition commitments.

Ben-Gvir and coalition lawmakers celebrated the passage with champagne and wore noose-shaped lapel pins, declaring it a historic deterrent against terrorism. The law is widely seen as discriminatory because it effectively excludes Jewish Israelis from facing the death penalty, as it applies only to acts intended to “negate the existence of the State of Israel”—a threshold legal experts say would rarely, if ever, apply to Jewish extremists.

Critics, including the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, have filed a petition to the Supreme Court, calling the law “discriminatory by design” and enacted without legal authority over occupied territory.

The law does not apply retroactively, excluding perpetrators of the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attacks, and faces potential judicial and logistical hurdles before any execution can occur—Israel has not carried out a death sentence since 1962, when Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann was executed.

International condemnation was swift: the European Union, along with France, Germany, Italy, and the UK, issued a joint statement calling the law “de facto discriminatory” and a violation of democratic principles. UN human rights chief Volker Türk warned that its application could constitute a war crime, while Palestinian leaders denounced it as “institutionalized extrajudicial killing.” The U.S. State Department said it respects Israel’s sovereignty but emphasized that any measures must uphold fair trial standards.