Israel Plumbs New Depths of Depravity, as the Knesset Passes a Death Penalty Bill for Palestinians
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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.”
“More Horrific Than Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo”: The Unsalvageable Depravity of Israel’s Prisons 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.
On June 19, 2024, Khaled Mahajneh, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, became the first lawyer to visit a notorious detention facility for Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, located inside the Sde Teiman military base in the Negev Desert, one of several detention facilities established after October 7, 2023 to hold Palestinians seized in Gaza.
Speaking to +972 Magazine a week after his visit, Mahanjeh drew a pertinent comparison with the treatment of Muslim prisoners in the US’s post-9/11 “war on terror”, but concluded that Israel’s behavior was even worse.
“The situation there is more horrific than anything we’ve heard about Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo”, he said, adding, “I have been visiting political and security detainees and prisoners in Israeli jails for years, including since October 7. I know that the conditions of detention have become much harsher, and that the prisoners are abused on a daily basis. But Sde Teiman was unlike anything I’ve seen or heard before.”
Who's still at Guantánamo?
