Israel’s parliament has voted to livestream special tribunals able to impose the death penalty on Gazan Palestinians for allegedly participating in “crimes against humanity”, using a legal framework last used to execute Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in 1962.
The Knesset voted 93-0 out of 120 parliamentarians for the new tribunals in the latest part of a legislative package that mandates capital punishment for Palestinians but not Israelis.
On March 30, the Knesset passed legislation requiring all Palestinians convicted of murdering Israelis in nationalist acts or terror to be hanged. This applies to ethnic Palestinians who have Israeli passports and all residents of the West Bank but not to ethnic Jews in either region.
At least 1,000 Gazans are currently held in administrative detention as ‘unlawful combatants” in Israel.
Many more have been imprisoned on the West Bank where there has been a surge in Jewish settler violence, including killings of Palestinians this year. They will be tried in military courts where the conviction rate is over 90 per cent, according to Israeli human rights groups.
The Gaza law will establish special tribunals to try people alleged to have taken part in the mass murder of about 1,200 people, many of them civilians, on October 7 2023 in the worst atrocity committed against Israelis since the nation was founded.
The hearing will be televised, as they were in the Eichmann trial. The Nazi was convicted of Holocaust crimes.
The only prisoner to have been executed following court proceedings was Israeli soldier Meir Tobianski who was shot in 1948 and later exonerated. Since 1962, Israel has not used the death penalty but has killed hundreds in extrajudicial so-called “targeted killings” in the Middle East and further abroad over many years of hit-squad operations by its intelligence services.
Diana Buttu, a Palestinian citizen of Israel and a human rights lawyer, said that the shift in Israeli national perception that has led to the support for the death penalty among left wing politicians had followed the October 7 atrocities, led by Hamas.
Israel has accepted that its forces killed at 70,000 people in its campaign against Gaza after the October attacks. Human rights groups, and the United Nations, have said that the majority, at least 47,000 were women and children.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, has been indicted for alleged war crimes at the International Criminal Court in the Hague as a result of what the UN’s experts has said was a campaign of genocide in the enclave.
“This is part of a package of legislation that has meant the Israelis can now register land on the West Bank as theirs only, whoever owns it, execute Palestinians who resist, and claim that their efforts to get rid of Palestinians completely is all legal,” said Ms Buttu.
The imposition of the death penalty on alleged Palestinian terrorists has been criticised by the UK government which expressed “deep concern” describing, it along with Australia, France, Germany, Italy, and New Zealand, as “de facto discriminatory” and warning that it could undermine Israel’s democratic principles.
The Gaza legislation is likely to be met with similar statements but there have been no sanctions threatened against Israel which now has a legal mandate in its own legal system to kill people who come from one ethnic group only.
