The Parliament of Israel approved on Monday a bill that makes execution by hanging a standard sentence for Palestinians convicted of deadly attacks in military courts, fulfilling a promise from the far-right allies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In the case of Israelis convicted of murder, the law would apply only when the crimes aim to ‘end the existence of Israel’, which, in practice, imposes the death penalty on Palestinians but not on Jewish Israeli perpetrators who commit similar crimes, according to critics.
The legislation drew international criticism of Israel, which is already under scrutiny due to the rising violence of Jewish settlers against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and its war in Gaza.
The measure includes provisions requiring a hanging execution within 90 days of the sentence, with some leeway for delays, but without the right to clemency. It offers the option to impose a life sentence instead of the capital punishment, but only in ‘special circumstances’ not specified.
Israel abolished the death penalty for murder in 1954. The only person executed in Israel after a civil trial was Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi architect of the Holocaust, in 1962.
Military courts in the West Bank already can sentence Palestinians to death, but have not done so.
The measure was promoted by Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right National Security Minister who wore lapel pins shaped like a noose before the vote.
‘This is a day of justice for the murdered, a day of deterrence for the enemies,’ Ben-Gvir said in the Parliament.
‘Whoever chooses terror chooses death’.
Discrimination
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas condemned the proposal, calling it a violation of international law and a condemned attempt to intimidate the Palestinians.
‘These laws and measures will not break the will of the Palestinian people nor undermine their resolve,’ Abbas’s office said in a statement.
‘Nor will they prevent them from continuing their legitimate struggle for freedom, independence, and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.’
The Palestinian militant groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad urged Palestinians to carry out attacks in retaliation to the law.
Main Israeli human-rights groups condemned the measure as ‘an act of institutionalized discrimination and racist violence against the Palestinians’. The Association for Civil Rights in Israel said it filed a petition against the law before the Israeli Supreme Court.
The law is the latest move by Netanyahu’s nationalist-religious coalition that has raised concerns among Israel’s Western allies, who have also criticized the violence of settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank.
