'Discriminatory by design': Israeli regime approves death penalty bill against Palestinians

The Israeli parliament has passed a discriminatory bill that targets Palestinians with death penalty, a new means of killing more Palestinians by the occupying entity, which the Palestinian Authority has already condemned as a “war crime.”

The 120-seat Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, on Monday adopted the one-sided bill that allows military courts to hand down the draconian sentence against Palestinians purportedly convicted of killing Israeli settlers or soldiers in what it described as acts of “terror.”

The so-called law, which enters into effect within 30 days, will be applied to Palestinians residing in the occupied West Bank who do not hold Israeli passports but will not cover Jewish Israeli settlers convicted of killing Palestinians.

Sixty-two lawmakers voted for the new law, including prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with 48 voting against it and one abstention.

Hawkish Israeli minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has pushed for the enactment of the law as one of the main conditions of his Otzma Yehudit party’s coalition agreement with Netanyahu.

The Palestinian Authority condemned the bill as “a war crime against the Palestinian people”, stressing that it breaches the Fourth Geneva Convention, “particularly the protections it guarantees for individuals and the safeguards for fair trials.”

The occupied West Bank is ruled by the Palestinian Authority – led by President Mahmoud Abbas - and thus, the Israeli parliament should not be legislating in the Palestinian territory.

According to Israeli Rights group B’Tselem, the conviction rate for Palestinians tried in military courts is about 96 percent, with convictions usually based on “confessions” obtained through “pressure and torture during interrogations.”

“The law is worded in such a way that it targets only Palestinians. And it will turn the killing of Palestinians into an accepted and common tool of punishment through several mechanisms,” the group warned in a post on X on Sunday.

Figures by Palestinian prisoner advocacy group Addameer show that over a third of the 9,500 Palestinians detained by Israel as of March 11 are being held under administrative detention without being tried.

Shortly after the passage of the law, the Israeli Association of Civil Rights said it had filed a petition with Israel’s Supreme Court to challenge it, denouncing it as “discriminatory by design” and “enacted without legal authority” over West Bank Palestinians.

It further warned that the “threshold for imposing the death penalty would be lowered” by the new law, stressing that now the military courts would be able to impose capital punishment by simple majority rather than a unanimous decision by judges.

The controversial law comes into effect as Israeli settlers and the regime’s military have commenced a new wave of violence against Palestinians, as growing atrocities were condemned by the foreign ministers of France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom on Sunday.

International rights groups have warned that the bill –if turned into law - would make the death penalty “another discriminatory tool in Israel’s system of apartheid.”

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