Zeynep ConkarIsrael has become the first Western-aligned “democracy” to legislate a mandatory death penalty targeting a single ethnic group under military occupation, and this week, it put that law into force.
The order was signed on Sunday by Major General Avi Bluth, commander of the Israeli army's Central Command, at the request of Defence Minister Israel Katz, the same minister who once ordered the immediate cut-off of water supply to Gaza and has publicly threatened Gaza's civilians with "total devastation" in what South African prosecutors and international legal experts cited as evidence of genocidal intent before the International Court of Justice.
Under the new law, military courts prosecuting Palestinians whose attacks resulted in the death of an Israeli must apply the death penalty as the sole available sentence, unless the court finds special circumstances allowing for life imprisonment instead.
Once a final ruling is handed down, the sentence must be carried out within 90 days.
Within Israeli courts, military orders always take precedence over Israeli and international law, according to Nasir Qadri, an international law practitioner and a critical legal scholar at Koc University.
“The system was never designed to adjudicate guilt; it was designed to administer a colonised population through the form of law, and a 96 percent conviction rate is its proof,” Qadri tells TRT World.
“The 90-day execution deadline and the prohibition on pardon or commutation remove formal residues from a structure already characterised by arbitrary arrest, incommunicado detention, secret evidence that defendants cannot challenge, and confessions extracted under torture,” he adds.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, whose far-right Jewish Power party had long campaigned for the measure, hailed the signing as a political victory, declaring "we promised and we fulfilled."
The law was passed by the Knesset on 30 March 2026, by a vote of 62 to 47, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu present in the chamber to support the bill.
Before the vote, it had already drawn wide condemnation, not only from Palestinian organisations and international human rights bodies, but from within Israel's own legal establishment.
This is a discriminatory behaviour under international law, Qadri argues.
“This law converts the colonial administration of Palestinian life into the colonial administration of Palestinian death, and does so through the same legal instruments, military orders, security classifications, and jurisdictional exclusions,” says Qadri.
“The prohibition on arbitrary deprivation of life under Article 6 of the ICCPR, as interpreted by the Human Rights Committee in General Comment 36, requires in capital cases the strictest observance of fair trial guarantees.”
“The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination stated in May 2026 that the law is de facto applicable to Palestinians only, given that its threshold, intent to negate the existence of the state, structurally excludes Israeli Jewish defendants by definition,” says Qadri.
A dual discriminatory system
The legislation's reach is defined by the dual legal system operating across the occupied West Bank.
Palestinians there live under military law, while Israeli settlers fall under civilian law, two parallel frameworks in the same territory.
The death penalty provision applies only through the military courts, which means it applies exclusively to Palestinians. In the civilian track, the law only covers those acting with the intent to deny the existence of the State of Israel, a definition designed to exclude Jewish defendants.
The law operates across two legal orders that share only a maximum penalty, according to Qadri.
“Palestinian defendants in the West Bank face military courts where judges are uniformed officers, confessions extracted under interrogation constitute primary evidence, and the conviction rate is 96 percent.”
“Israeli defendants face civilian courts with independent judges, full evidentiary standards, and a Supreme Court appellate structure. Placing the same capital sanction across both frameworks without equalising the procedural conditions that determine whether it is applied fairly is a structural guarantee of differential outcomes,” Qadri explains.
The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination said the law rolls back Israel's long-standing de facto moratorium on executions, in place since 1962, and noted with concern that it "prohibits mitigation, commutation or pardon of the death penalty" once a sentence is handed down.
UN experts have warned that the mandatory nature of the sentence violates the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which Israel ratified in 1991, under which mandatory death sentences are prohibited as inherently arbitrary.
What it means for Palestinians behind bars
The law comes into force against a backdrop of severe and worsening conditions for Palestinians in Israeli arbitrary detention.
As of March 2026, approximately 9,500 Palestinians are held in Israeli prisons, with about half under administrative detention or labelled "unlawful combatants," held without charge and unable to defend themselves in court.
Palestinian prisoners' rights groups have described the new law as an "unprecedented act of savagery," accusing Israel of codifying violence against detainees amid mounting reports of torture and deaths in custody since the genocide in Gaza intensified.
“Administrative detention is a colonial relic, the bitter fruit of Britain's 1945 Emergency Regulations, exported and perfected across an archipelago of twenty-five detention centres, prisons, and interrogation facilities, twenty-one of them inside Israel itself,” Qadri says.
“What the death penalty law changes is not the material conditions of detention; the torture, the medical neglect, the enforced disappearance of hundreds of families still unable to determine whether their loved ones are alive, detained, or dead; but the existential conditions, so that every unanswered question about a detained relative now carries the weight of an execution deadline,” he adds.
The Association for Civil Rights in Israel, alongside Adalah and several other rights organisations, has petitioned the High Court against the law, arguing it is racially discriminatory, unconstitutional, and that the Knesset has no authority to legislate directly for the occupied West Bank.
The court has yet to issue a final ruling. In the meantime, the law is in force, and for Palestinians facing military prosecution, the death penalty is the default sentence the law prescribes.
“This is the precise function of what international law has failed to name, not merely to kill, but to make an exposed population live in permanent, calibrated proximity to death as a technique of control over the living,” Qadri says.
“The law is not addressed to the defendant; it is addressed to the population,” he adds.
