Israel Approves Lawless Show Trials and Mass Executions for Palestinians Seized on Oct. 7, 2023

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As the beleaguered International Criminal Court seeks an arrest warrant for Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben-Gvir, in charge of Israel’s torture prisons, and a key driver of legislation approving the death penalty for Palestinians, and establishing a special military tribunal to prosecute and execute those seized on Oct. 7 , 2023, continues to evade accountability.

When the Nazis held the Wannsee Conference on January 1942 to co-ordinate the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” — the extermination of all the Jews in German-controlled Europe — it was attended by 15 high-level administrators in the relevant government departments, and the SS.

When senior officials in Israel were planning the genocide of the Palestinian people of the Gaza Strip, after October 7, 2023, no single conference was convened to facilitate what it would be appropriate to call Israel’s “Final Solution to the Palestinian Question”, but key officials can be readily identified.

The first two are Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the former Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant, for whom arrest warrants were issued by the International Criminal Court on November 21, 2024, for war crimes and crimes against humanity — the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare, and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.

Another is Israel Katz, the monstrous hardliner who was nominated to take over from Gallant two weeks before the ICC arrest warrants were issued, and two others are ministers from two extreme far-right parties in the coalition government that Netanyahu was obliged to form after elections in November 2022 — Bezalel Smotrich, the Minister of Finance, from the Religious Zionist Party, who is the main driver of the massively increased state-backed Israeli violence in the West Bank, and Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Minister of National Security, from the Jewish Power party. Both have histories involving terrorism, and Ben-Gvir, notoriously, was a follower of Meir Kahane, the far-right US-born terrorist whose brand of genocidal ideology, Kahanism, is a major component in Israel’s increasing drive towards fascistic supremacism.

Ben-Gvir is in charge of the police, and of the reviled prison system for Palestinians, where the torture, abuse and rape of Palestinian prisoners has become normalized since October 7, 2023, where at least 100 prisoners have been killed, where 75 doctors and medical staff seized in Gaza are still held without charge or trial, and from which the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the globally-recognized international monitor of prison conditions, has been completely banned for the last 31 months, a scandal that should be a source of profound international outrage.

Ben-Gvir is also, noticeably, the only prominent Israeli government minister who is unwilling, or even incapable of disguising his contempt for foreigners, except for those who know their place, as he publicly revealed yesterday, when, having engaged in piracy in international waters, abducting the 430 activists from 45 countries on the latest Global Sumud Flotilla — who were seeking to reach Gaza to, at the very least, provide some moral support to the trapped Palestinians — and subjecting them to “extraordinary rendition” by bringing them to Israel and imprisoning them, he had himself filmed as he gave them a taste of the violence and humiliation to which Palestinian prisoners are subjected, and then posted the video on social media, to the disgust of governments worldwide.

In addition, as Middle East Eye described it, “Both ministers live in West Bank settlements [that are] illegal under international law, and both have championed annexation of the territory and the return of Israeli settlers to Gaza.”

While Katz has so far escaped overt international censure, despite his history of monstrous genocidal statements and actions against the Palestinians and the Lebanese people, the ICC’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan KC, was reported to be preparing arrest warrants for both Smotrich and Ben-Gvir before he became embroiled in an extremely dubious sexual misconduct scandal, leading to his suspension, and the imposition of punitive sanctions, by the US government, on Khan, eight ICC judges and two prosecutors last year, which I discussed in a recent article examining how — wrongly, as a US judge has now established — sanctions were also extended to Francesca Albanese, the UN Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

The witch hunt against Karim Khan KC, the ICC’s chief prosecutor

Despite being “cleared of all wrongdoing by a panel of judges appointed to review the findings of a United Nations investigation into sexual misconduct allegations against him”, as Middle East Eye reported in March, the witch hunt against him has continued. At the start of April, a majority of the 21 member states of the Bureau of the Assembly of States Parties (ASP), which is the ICC’s governing body, “backed a motion to disregard the judges’ report, suggesting that Khan may have committed some form of misconduct.”

Staff members at the ICC, describing themselves as the “silent majority”, subsequently wrote to the court’s governing body in support of the chief prosecutor, but the situation is so toxic and politicized that Khan himself is now speaking out publicly about his fears, firstly to Mehdi Hasan of Zeteo, and, more recently, to David Hearst of Middle East Eye, in an interview in which he decried the ASP’s actions, and “warned that the ongoing campaign against him had pitched the court into ‘unchartered territory’, which he said risked creating a dangerous precedent for removing elected officials through political pressure.”

As he described it, “If a process can be suborned, if it can be subverted, if it can be undermined, because state appointees and diplomats, for whatever reason, think they know better, then this is a template for getting rid of any elected official, now or in the future, on spurious or flimsy or fabricated or unfounded grounds.”

Despite these attacks on Khan, which, of course, are fundamentally aimed at discrediting and, ultimately, dismantling the ICC, his office has continued the essential work of seeking to hold individuals to account for the gravest of crimes.

At the weekend, rumors emerged, first aired by Haaretz, that new ICC arrest warrants were to be issued, with Smotich and Ben-Gvir both named, along with Orit Strook, the far-right Minister for Settlement and National Missions of Israel (also a member of Religious Zionist Party), and two unnamed military officials, but, as of now, it seems that just one application for an arrest warrant has been submitted, which must now be reviewed by a pre-trial chamber of three judges.

The application for an ICC arrest warrant for Bezalel Smotrich

That arrest warrant is for Bezalel Smotrich, with suggestions that charges against him include forced displacement as a crime against humanity and a war crime, the transfer of Israel’s own population as a war crime, and persecution and apartheid as crimes against humanity. As Middle East Eye noted, “If approved by the ICC’s pre-trial chamber the warrant for Smotrich would be the first ever issued by an international court for the crime of apartheid.”

Both Smotrich and Ben-Gvir already face some sanctions internationally. The UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Norway jointly imposed sanctions on them in June 2025, and Slovenia, the Netherlands, Belgium and Spain have also “imposed their own travel restrictions, with the Dutch ban extending across the 29-country Schengen Area”, as Middle East Eye described it.

Smotrich immediately responded with apocalyptic rage, claiming that the application for an arrest warrant amounts to a “declaration of war”, and immediately threatening retaliation against Palestinians.

“Last night I was informed that a request for a secret international arrest warrant had been filed against me by the criminal prosecutor of the Anti-Semitic Tribunal in The Hague” he said, adding, “Issuing arrest warrants against the prime minister is a declaration of war. Issuing arrest warrants against the minister of defence and the minister of finance is a declaration of war. And in the face of a declaration of war, we will fight back with a vengeance.”

He then accused the Palestinian Authority of “starting a war” by engaging with the ICC, stated that he was “very proud” of his settlement expansion policies, despite them being almost universally condemned (not least in a hugely significant ICJ opinion in July 2024), and added that he would “use his powers to sign an immediate order to expel residents of the Palestinian village of Khan al-Ahmar in the occupied West Bank.”

“From today” he spluttered, “any — economic or otherwise — anything that I can harm within the framework of my powers will be attacked. Not talk and gimmicks — actions.”

While the issuing of an application for an arrest warrant for Smotrich is an excellent development, it is troubling that justice is so slow when it comes to Itamar Ben-Gvir, because, although it appears that an ICC evidence review took place last week to examine the possibility of two more arrest warrant applications, including one for Ben-Gvir, those applications have yet to be filed.

The omission to date, of Ben-Gvir is, to put it mildly, unfortunate, because he is not only personally responsible for the atrocities in Israel’s prisons for Palestinians, he is also the main driver within the government of support for laws formally authorizing the death penalty for Palestinians.

Itamar Ben-Gvir and Israel’s sickeningly bloodthirsty quest to execute Palestinian prisoners

Although it would not be inaccurate to assess Israel’s actions, over the last 31 months, as involving a de facto death penalty on all Palestinians — via the active and ongoing genocide of the civilian population of the Gaza Strip, the unpunished murders of Palestinians by settlers in the West Bank, and the unpunished murders of Palestinian prisoners in Israel’s prisons — the latest decisions in the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, to actively and aggressively pursue the death penalty for Palestinians within a judicial framework plumb new depths in the ongoing depravity of the State of Israel.

This trend began at the end of March, when, with enthusiastic support from Ben-Gvir in particular, who brought champagne to celebrate the result, the Knesset passed a new law, the “Death Penalty for Terrorists” law, making the death penalty mandatory for Palestinians convicted of killings in circumstances regarded as terrorism, as I explained in my article, Israel Plumbs New Depths of Depravity, as the Knesset Passes a Death Penalty Bill for Palestinians.

As Amnesty International explained in a news release at the time, “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.”

Erika Guevara-Rosas, Amnesty International’s Senior Director of Research, Advocacy, Policy and Campaigns, said, in response to the passage of the new law, “Today, Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, adopted the first in what threatens to be a series of laws facilitating the use of the death penalty, in a public display of cruelty, discrimination and utter contempt for human rights.”

She added, “By authorising military courts, which have a conviction rate of over 99% for Palestinian defendants and which are notorious for disregarding due process and fair trial safeguards, to impose effectively mandatory death sentences and ordering the execution within just 90 days of the final ruling, Israel is brazenly granting itself carte blanche to execute Palestinians while stripping away the most basic fair-trial safeguards.”

The approval of a special military tribunal to try those seized on October 7, 2023

Fulfilling Guevara-Rosas’ fears that this would be “the first in what threatens to be a series of laws facilitating the use of the death penalty”, on May 11, by 93 votes to zero, the Knesset passed a new law, the “Prosecution of Participants in the October 7 Massacre Events” law, approving the creation of a special military tribunal to try Palestinians accused of playing a role in the attacks on southern Israel on October 7, 2023.

The tribunal’s target is the estimated 250 to 300 prisoners, routinely described as the “Nukhbas” within Israel — a reference to the elite “Nukhba” force, the specialized commando unit of the Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the Hamas government — who were seized on October 7, and who have been imprisoned in the most gruelling and dehumanizing conditions in special prisons ever since. From what I can tell, they are forbidden to move, to speak to one another or to pray, and have been held in these conditions persistently for the last 31 months.

As Al Jazeera reported, the legislation proposes the creation of “a dedicated military headquarters and court in Jerusalem to handle the mass prosecution of Palestinians”, although, crucially, despite promises of transparency on Israel’s part, including public broadcasts of the proceedings, the legislation, fundamentally, authorizes the tribunal system “to deviate from standard rules around evidence, legal procedures and detention, as well as granting judges the full authority to issue the death penalty against Palestinians implicated by prosecutors in the attacks.”

Al Jazaera spoke to Muna Haddad, an attorney with Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, who submitted a formal objection to the legislation, and who explained how it “intentionally lowers legal protections to guarantee fair trials in order to secure the mass conviction of Palestinians.”

As she said, “The bill explicitly permits mass trials that deviate from standard rules of evidence, including broad judicial discretion to admit evidence obtained under coercive conditions that may amount to torture or ill-treatment. This constitutes a severe violation of fair trial guarantees that falls well short of international law requirements.”

Speaking of the pledge to broadcast the proceedings, Haddad warned that this effectively “transforms proceedings into show trials at the expense of the accused’s rights”, stating that broadcasts would “violate the presumption of innocence, the right to a fair trial, and the right to dignity”, and would constitute a framework that “effectively treats indictment as a finding of guilt, before any judicial examination has begun.”

Because the “Death Penalty for Terrorists” law “cannot be applied retroactively”, as Al Jazeera proceeded to explain, “the new framework seeks to transplant existing Israeli criminal codes — such as treason, assisting an enemy in wartime and the 1950 Law for Preventing and Punishing the Crime of Genocide — into an entirely new legal construct with substantially lower standards of due process.”

Al Jazeera noted that Israeli legislators “have repeatedly compared the upcoming proceedings to the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, a chief architect of the Nazi Holocaust”, although Haddad “pointed out glaring historical and legal discrepancies in drawing parallels.” As she explained, “Adolf Eichmann was not, in fact, tried under the Genocide Law but the Nazi and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law.”

She warned that the new legislation seeks to apply the crime of genocide in an “expansive and exceptional manner, despite it being one of the most serious, complex and narrowly defined offences in international law, one whose adjudication demands particularly rigorous evidentiary and legal scrutiny.”

That is legally accurate, although it strips away the shock of the realization that what Israel intends to do, without any sense of self-awareness, is to portray the attacks on October 7, 2023 as a genocide — which they were not — while ignoring the glaringly evident reality that, since that date, the State of Israel has actively and enthusiastically been engaged in a verifiable genocide of the Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip.

Nothing could make clearer the perceived value, to Israel, of Israeli lives over Palestinian lives than the fact that they regard the killing of hundreds of Israelis in one day of violence in response to 75 years of oppression, murder, lawless imprisonment and apartheid as being more significant than the cold-blooded murder of at least one hundred times as many Palestinians — and probably many more — over the last 31 months, in a dedication to human extermination that still shows no sign of ever being brought to an end.

Lessons from Guantánamo and the “war on terror”

As someone with a long history of scrutinizing military courts set up to prosecute the alleged perpetrators of what are regarded as “exceptional” crimes — based on my 20 years of studying and writing about the US’s prison at Guantánamo Bay, and its trial system, the military commissions — everything about Israel’s plans bears a marked similarity to the novel approaches to justice implemented in the commissions, unwisely dredged up from the history books by Vice President Dick Cheney in a spirit of vengeance that sought to rewrite justice through speedy capital trials involving the use of so-called “evidence” derived through the use of torture.

Cheney ran up against huge and unforeseen problems when a number of military prosecutors rebelled, refusing to contaminate the pursuit of justice with the bitter fruits of the use of torture. The US Supreme Court damned Cheney’s commissions as unconstitutional in 2006, but Congress then revived them, as did President Obama, after briefly suspending them when he first took office, when he ill-advisedly brought them back to life in November 2009.

Since then, they have limped on in a “Groundhog Day” of futility, as Pentagon-appointed defense teams have sought to expose the use of torture against their clients, while prosecutors have sought to keep it hidden, and as even the Pentagon-appointed judges, in some cases, have refused to make themselves complicit in unfair processes designed to whitewash the use of torture.

The whole story of Guantánamo, the CIA “black sites”, the use of torture and its incompatibility with justice continues to haunt the US, however much it is, for the most part, conveniently engulfed in a miasma of collective amnesia by both politicians and the mainstream media.

For Israel, however, no such compunctions exist. It has spent decades prosecuting Palestinians in unfair and profoundly biased military trials, in a system in which the use of torture appears to be routine, and, as a result, it presumably thinks, with its typical overweening arrogance, that its show trials will actually demonstrate the truth of its incessantly misplaced sense of victimhood, and the justifiable vengeance of its delivery of appropriate punishment.

Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. If its special military tribunal goes ahead, it will only open Israel up to global confirmation of how it is prepared, with gleefully vindictive enthusiasm, to sacrifice all notions of justice on the altar of vengeance.

Anyone in any doubt about this needs only to watch Itamar Ben-Gvir, who, yet again, has his terrorist fingerprints all over this legislation, lining up bound prisoners lying facedown on the floor of an Israeli prison last October and being filmed declaring, “These guys, the Nukhba who came to kill children, women, our babies. Look at them today. But there’s still something that must be done: the death penalty for the terrorists.”

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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.

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