Israel Plumbs New Depths of Depravity, as the Knesset Passes a Death Penalty Bill for Palestinians

Please click on either of the ‘Donate’ or ‘Buy’ buttons below (via PayPal or Stripe) to make a donation towards the $2,500 (£2,000) I’m trying to raise to support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist over the next three months. To get links to all my work in your inbox, please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.

 

For the last two and a half years, the State of Israel has been engaged in an unspeakably horrific genocide in Gaza, in which, at a bare minimum, over 70,000 people — mostly civilians — have been murdered, as well as massively increasing the number of Palestinians, to over 9,000, who are held in a grotesque and largely arbitrary apartheid prison system, for Palestinians only, in which torture is mandatory, rape is widespread, and over a hundred Palestinians have been murdered in that same time period.

With Israel also engaged, over the last month, in the largely indiscriminate carpet-bombing of civilians in Lebanon and Iran, it’s hard to imagine that this brutal, sickeningly and knowingly lawless and permanently warmongering entity could sink any lower into the depths of depravity, but yesterday the Israeli Knesset managed just that, passing a “Death Penalty for Terrorists” amendment to its already bloated and draconian prison legislation regarding Palestinians.

As Amnesty International explained in a news release today, “The new law explicitly creates two legal frameworks for the use of the death penalty in the occupied West Bank, excluding the illegally annexed East Jerusalem, and in Israel.”

In the first of these legal frameworks, “Military courts in the occupied West Bank will be authorized to impose the death penalty against Palestinians convicted of deliberate killings in actions that are defined as terrorist acts under Israel’s discriminatory counter-terrorism law. Only under special circumstances that the bill fails to specify will courts be allowed to order a life sentence — and life sentence only — instead. The Defence Minister is authorised to determine whether defendants from the West Bank will be tried before military or civilian courts. Those sentenced to death are not entitled to pardon, making this one of the world’s most extreme death penalty laws.”

Under the second framework, which is “applicable in Israel and illegally annexed East Jerusalem”, “civilian courts’ authority to issue the death sentence would be expanded to include any person convicted of intentionally killing another with the ‘aim of negating the existence of the state of Israel.’” As Amnesty added, “Such an ideological requirement for intent practically means the law is designed to target Palestinians.”

Also reporting on the passing of the new law, the Times of Israel noted that it was “approved after nearly 12 hours of debate”, and that it “mandates death by hanging as the default punishment for West Bank residents convicted of terrorist acts by military courts”, adding that, “While judges can opt for life imprisonment under vaguely defined ‘special circumstances’, the death penalty would otherwise be mandatory.”

As the Times of Israel also noted , “The sentence would require a simple majority of judges rather than a unanimous decision, while eliminating any right of appeal”, also making a point of stating that the new law “effectively enshrines capital punishment for Palestinians alone, as it explicitly excludes Israeli citizens or residents, and Palestinians alone are tried in military courts”, whereas “Israelis are tried in civilian courts.”

The newspaper also explained that, “Though a separate provision allows courts to impose the death penalty on anyone, including Israeli citizens, it applies only to those who ‘intentionally cause the death of a person with the aim of denying the existence of the State of Israel’”, which it correctly noted was “a definition that in practice excludes Jewish terrorists.”

The new law doesn’t apply retroactively, but worse will follow if it isn’t repealed

Crucially, and as has not always been mentioned in the flurry of social media activity relating to the passage of the new law, the Times of Israel made clear that it “will not apply retroactively.”

However, no one should be in any doubt that, if the law stands, and is not either thrown out by Israel’s Supreme Court, or withdrawn through concerted international pressure, those who pushed for its passage — led by the Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, a follower of the far-right Israeli terrorist Meir Kahane, who has, in the past, been convicted for crimes including incitement to racism and support for terrorism, and is the pre-eminent Nazi thug in Benjamin Netanyahu’s wretched genocidal coalition government — will push for further laws that can be applied retroactively.

In particular, Ben-Gvir has a burning hatred of the Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti, a compellingly articulate advocate for Palestinian independence, who is regularly described as “the Palestinian Mandela”, and is the most popular choice of leader amongst the Palestinian people.

Barghouti, however, has been imprisoned since 2002 — serving five cumulative life sentences, and an additional 40-year sentence — after a trial about which an observer for the international Inter-Parliamentary Union stated, “The numerous breaches of international law” observed and analyzed “make it impossible to conclude that Mr. Barghouti was given a fair trial.”

In October 2025, Ben-Gvir released a video clip of him visiting Marwan Barghouti — now 66 years of age, and looking visibly frail — in his cell, where he proceeded to issue the following extraordinary threat: “You will not defeat us. Anyone who dares to harm the people of Israel, anyone who kills our children or our women, we will wipe them out. You already know this has always been the case throughout history.”

How many Palestinians will Israel seek to execute?

Despite the lack of a retroactive application of the new law, meaning that neither Marwan Barghouti nor the other 1,328 Palestinian prisoners currently serving prison sentences on “security” grounds fall under its scope, it is realistic to fear that other Palestinians held in Israel’s network of prisons for Palestinians may be vulnerable to hastily-implemented trials if the legislation is not overturned.

According to B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, “At the end of December 2025, the Israel Prison Service (IPS) was holding 9,128 Palestinians in detention or in prison on what it defined as ‘security’ grounds, including 1,477 from the Gaza Strip.”

Of those 9,128 prisoners, or “detainees”, excluding the 1,329 serving prison sentences, 2,780 were being “detained until the conclusion of legal proceedings”, meaning that some of them could be eligible for execution if they are found guilty of killings that can be interpreted as “acts of terror.”

Alarmingly, the military courts responsible for sentencing those who come before them have an appalling track record of both ignoring evidence of torture or other forms of abuse that ought to make any kind of confession unreliable, and of delivering convictions in close to 100% of the cases.

This is a double blow to notions of fairness and justice that I can confirm, through my 20-year study of the US’s behavior in its “war on terror” at Guantánamo and in the CIA “black sites”, makes the US’s barbaric efforts to launder torture evidence and conduct flagrantly unfair trials involving the death penalty look like a model of probity. For “kangaroo court trials”, no country in the so-called “democratic” western world comes close to Israel’s contempt for the law.

Those held also include 409 “detainees” who have not been charged or tried, and 1,235 detained under Israel’s “Incarceration of Unlawful Combatants Law”, passed in 2002, at the same time that the Bush administration declared those held at Guantánamo to be “unlawful enemy combatants” who could be detained indefinitely without charge or trial. Israel defines an “unlawful combatant” as “a person who is not entitled to the status of prisoner of war and belongs to a force carrying out hostilities against the State of Israel or has taken part in hostilities against the State of Israel, even indirectly.”

The other 3,375 prisoners are held in “administrative detention”, another malignant legal subterfuge, inherited from the British, which allows Israel to hold people without charge or trial on a six-month basis, which can be renewed every six months with no upper time limit for its application.

I expect that the new law won’t apply to the majority of these prisoners, because so much of Israel’s detention system for Palestinians is so arbitrary, both as a way of terrorizing the Palestinian population in general through arbitrary arrests, and releases that are just as arbitrary, but also because the reason that so many of these trial-free forms of imprisonment exist is because there is, fundamentally, no justifiable legal basis for depriving these thousands of people of their liberty in the first place.

Future horrors: the “Nakhba” execution bill

However, what is genuinely alarming is that, as Amnesty described it, “In addition to the death penalty amendment, the Constitution, Law and Justice committee at the Knesset advanced on 24 March for a second and third readings the Tribunals’ Law (‘Prosecution of Participants in October 7 Massacre events’) bill, which mandates the establishment of an ad hoc tribunal, effectively acting as a military court, to try individuals charged with participating in the 7 October attacks.”

This bill, as Amnesty added, “authorizes the tribunal to impose the death penalty on those convicted and allows it to significantly deviate from standard procedural rules and evidentiary laws if it is ‘deemed necessary for the clarification of the truth and performance of justice.’”

Although many, if not most of the 1,477 prisoners held who are from the Gaza Strip are imprisoned as a result of pure vindictiveness, or were viewed as potential hostages in negotiations, some are undoubtedly regarded as having been complicit in the October 7 attacks, the co-called “Nukhba” terrorists, the elite special forces unit within the Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, who are regarded as primarily responsible for leading the attacks.

Footage of these men, in truly appalling conditions — chained, blindfolded and made to kneel or lie down relentlessly, with no indication of any breaks allowed for prayer or recreation, and with, presumably, the threat, often realized, of being subjected at any time to acts of extreme violence — have occasionally been aired by the Israeli media, and it is this group of men who are at the greatest risk of execution should this second law be passed.

It’s also worth pointing out — again from my long research into the US’s “war on terror” — that conditions like these are at least as horrific as the gravest human rights abuses undertaken in the CIA’s “black sites.”

Why Israel must be stopped

In conclusion, I have to say that, although this new law is, whichever way you look at, nothing less than sickening, it also highlights, in a very specific legal context, quite how openly deranged the State of Israel has become, and how, through its complete contempt for international law, it almost seems to be willing the world to isolate it as a pariah state.

Israel’s complex mental sickness is such that its enthusiastic embrace of genocidal slaughter as its only rationale for existence, is more marked now than at any time since the original Nakba of 1948, when its front-line terrorist foot soldiers engaged in the vilest forms of rape and murder.

Israel wants to be hated, because only then can it retreat into the safety of its all-encompassing victimhood, which is so pronounced that, it seems, the majority of its ever more fascistic population can only wail relentlessly about the injustice of it all while being completely unable to recognize that, by any objective measure, what they have been doing for the last two and a half years in Gaza makes them at least as evil, if not more so, than the Nazis who sought to wipe them out in the Holocaust.

Israel today seeks nothing less than the complete extermination of the Palestinian people, through any and all means, and the reintroduction of the death penalty, as a kind of sickening coda, only makes that all too clear.

As almost the whole of the rest of the world has relinquished the imposition of capital punishment, recognizing it as particularly barbaric, and with no redress possible for miscarriages of justice, Israel, under Ben-Gvir, revels in its reintroduction, making clear how, for Israel in 2026, there is no barbarism that is not worth undertaking if it will help to rid them of the scourge of “terrorists”, even though those “terrorists” are actually resistance fighters seeking only to survive an unimaginable oppression to which they have been subjected, through generation after generation, for the last 78 years.

Why would Israel in 2026 care about miscarriages of justice, when its leaders and its people believe, by a crushing majority, that there are no innocent Palestinians; that, to repeat what I noted above, they must all be exterminated?

It is time for all of Israel’s supporters — primarily those in the west who are, and have been, to varying degrees, devastatingly complicit in its genocidal crimes over the last two and a half years — to finally cut the umbilical cord that connects them to this ever more monstrous mass-murdering monster, and to admit that they were wrong to constantly indulge Israel because of what happened to the Jewish people in the Holocaust. The abused have so definitively become the abuser that the very notion of humanity has been pushed to its limits.

It is time for the world to recognize the compelling validity of the opinion issued by the International Court of Justice in July 2024, in which the Court unequivocally asserted that Israel’s entire occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, dating back to 1967, is illegal, and to take the necessary steps to enforce its withdrawal.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of a photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’, which ran from 2012 to 2023), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo”, which you can watch on YouTube here.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here. He has also, since, October 2023, been sickened and appalled by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and you can read his detailed coverage here.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s new Substack account, set up in November 2024, where he’ll be sending out a weekly newsletter, or his RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and the full military commissions list.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation via PayPal or via Stripe.