🔴 Palestinian Prisoner’s Society: Ongoing and accelerating efforts of the Israeli occupation to approve the death penalty law against Palestinian political prisoners

With the Israeli occupation’s Knesset accelerating its efforts to pass the “Death Penalty for Prisoners” Law and its approval in the first reading by the Knesset “National Security Committee,” the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society affirms the following:

• The occupation has never ceased carrying out extrajudicial executions of Palestinians — whether through deliberate killing during arrest, interrogation, assassination, or fatal medical denial — all within a systematic framework of medical crimes.

• What is happening today is merely another step to entrench an existing, decades-long crime by “legalizing” it through laws, legislation, and military orders.

• The Israeli colonial regime has for decades practiced slow execution policies against hundreds of prisoners through systematic tools and methods that led to the martyrdom of dozens. These policies have escalated unprecedentedly since the start of the genocide, making the current phase the bloodiest in the history of the Palestinian prisoners’ movement. Since the beginning of the war until early November 2025, 81 prisoners have been martyred in occupation prisons — those publicly identified — in addition to dozens of Gaza detainees who were executed and remain under enforced disappearance.

• A major indication of the ongoing executions is the bodies of martyrs returned from Gaza after the genocide; many were found to have been detainees later executed. Some appeared in recorded footage alive before being confirmed executed and their bodies mutilated.

• The advancement of the death penalty bill to its first reading was not surprising to those following the prisoners’ issue, especially amid the unprecedented brutality of the occupation system, which continues its genocide while prisons form one of its key arenas — extending from Gaza to all detention sites.

• Despite the clear stance of international law, which has worked to abolish the death penalty through several treaties, including one of global scope, the occupation’s insistence on codifying this crime and giving it a “legal” facade reaffirms that the occupation acts above the law and beyond accountability — a fact laid bare by the genocide and the international community’s failure and systematic complicity with the colonial killing apparatus.

• The occupation’s brutality has reached an unparalleled level, rendering human rights terminology insufficient to describe it. The occupying state has not only killed dozens of prisoners and detainees since the start of the genocide but now seeks to entrench execution as a formal law.

• The proposed “Death Penalty for Prisoners Law” is not new; it exists within the occupation’s legal framework, partly inherited from British occupation laws. However, its implementation remained restricted and went through several stages and amendments, tied to past attempts to impose the death penalty on Palestinian freedom fighters.

• This has always been linked to internal political orientations within the occupation state. With the rise of Israel’s most extreme right-wing government in its history, calls have intensified — led by the fascist minister Ben Gvir, members of Likud, Yisrael Beiteinu, and other right-wing Knesset members — to enact the law, even tying the fate of the governing coalition to its approval, with direct support from the fascist Benjamin Netanyahu.