In the halls of parliament on March 30, 2026, Israeli lawmakers waved bottles of champagne as it was announced that a bill mandating the death penalty for certain crimes became law.

“From today onward, every terrorist shall know, and the whole world shall know, he who takes life, the State of Israel will take his life,” Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir declared after the bill was approved.1

The law passed with 62 members of Israel’s parliament, or Knesset, voting in favor, and sparked international backlash, with eight Arab and Islamic countries2 and Amnesty International condemning its passage, and France, Germany, and the United Kingdom denouncing it before it passed.3

Locally, Israeli human rights groups Adalah, HaMoked, Physicians for Human Rights—Israel, and Gisha, along with Palestinian Knesset members Aida Touma-Sliman, Ayman Odeh, and Ahmed Tibi, immediately filed a petition to Israel’s Supreme Court demanding the law’s cancellation.4

“[The petition] demands both cancellation, just to pronounce that the law is void and null for being unconstitutional, and . . . an immediate interim injunction to hold the law’s implementation,” Muna Haddad, attorney with Adalah, said during a virtual briefing on the law led by the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) Policy Project on April 9, 2026.5

Israel’s Supreme Court decided on March 31, 2026, that the state must respond to the petition and the request for an interim injunction by May 24, 2026.6

Entitled the “Death Penalty for Terrorists Law,” the legislation imposes a death sentence upon individuals convicted of intentionally causing death in an act of terrorism.7

One component of the law establishes the death penalty as the default sentence for Palestinian residents of the occupied West Bank who are convicted of intentional killing in an act of terrorism, while excluding Israeli residents and citizens who live in the West Bank from such a sentence. Israel’s Military Commander of the West Bank is not allowed to commute or alter a death sentence, and the execution must be carried out within 90 days.8

“In the first track, it’s directed against Palestinians from the West Bank who are under occupation and military rule,” Haddad said. “So in relation to the West Bank . . . we now have an Israeli law that is unlawfully being extended to occupied territory. This in itself is a violation of international law and an illegal act.”

Given that Palestinians in the West Bank are under Israeli military occupation, they are tried in Israeli military courts—not civil courts. Israeli military court cases have an extremely high conviction rate, with a Haaretz analysis of military court cases between 2018 and 2021 finding that 99.6 percent of sentences ended with a plea bargain and 96 percent ended in conviction.9

“This is one of the clearest forms of the Jewish supremacist apartheid system imposed on the indigenous people of Palestine . . . Israeli state officials have been so blunt about it,” Dimitri Diliani, president of the National Christian Coalition in the Holy Land and spokesperson for Fatah’s Reformist Democratic faction, told Jerusalem Story (hear audio, below). He says that Israeli soldiers have for years carried out “field executions” of Palestinians, targeting hundreds of wanted Palestinians in assassinations instead of trying them in the courts. When Palestinians are detained, the court system is fundamentally unjust, and now the sentence itself is the death penalty with little recourse for appeal.

“You’re placing the indigenous Palestinian population of Palestine under a law that allows for their execution in military tribunals that have such [a] high conviction rate, which is basically codifying the field execution that has been taking place for years,” Diliani said.10

The law defines an act of terrorism by referring to Israel’s Counter-Terrorism Law, which categorizes terror offenses broadly and ambiguously.

“[The Counter-Terrorism Law] includes acts that are carried out with a political, national, or ideological motive—so whatever [Israel] decide[s] that is—and with the aim of creating fear or influencing a government,” Haddad said. “And in practice, this very wide definition is only applied, of course, to Palestinians.”

Moreover, the death penalty law amends the “Order Regarding Security Provisions,” the main legal framework governing Palestinians in the West Bank, so that nearly all those convicted of intentional killing in an act of terrorism are sentenced to death as opposed to life imprisonment.11

“[This] is very exceptional in itself—even within countries that have the death penalty still intact,” Haddad said. “So like: having a mandatory sentence where the court can only deviate to life imprisonment only in extreme and exceptional cases. This is absolutely prohibited under international law.”

The other component of the law targets Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians residents of Jerusalem and Gaza by amending Israel’s Penal Law so that an individual convicted of intentionally causing death with the aim of negating the existence of the Israeli state will either be sentenced to death or life imprisonment.12

“The offense that has been added, which is anyone who commits an intentional act of killing undermining the existence of the State of Israel . . . is very vague. We can’t really understand what [that] is, but you know that it’s directed against Palestinians,” Haddad said. “And it’s under what the law defines as ‘terror circumstances,’ which, of course, applies to Palestinians. And in this case, unlike what happens in the West Bank, the court can choose between a life sentence or a death penalty.”

In both components, executions are to be carried out by hanging.13

The law does not apply retroactively, meaning individuals who are currently in prison or being held under administrative detention will not face the death penalty.

“It applies only to events that took or will take place after its enactment and official publishing,” Dr. Suhad Bishara, Adalah’s legal director who coauthored the petition with Haddad, told Jerusalem Story.14 “However, anything that happens after, it will be activated . . . These trials might take some time, depending on whether we’re talking about Israeli civil courts or military courts in the West Bank.”

Israel is considered a de facto abolitionist state, having only carried out the death penalty once against convicted Nazi Adolph Eichmann in 1962 and consistently voted for the abolition of the death penalty in United Nations (UN) resolutions. In 1954, Israel repealed the death penalty for Israeli citizens.15 However, this abolitionist mindset has not applied to Palestinians, Palestinian lawyer Diana Buttu argues.

“It [Israel] has always had the death penalty on the books when it comes to Palestinians who are being tried under this military system since 1967,” Buttu said during IMEU’s briefing on April 9, 2026. “The difference is that unlike what the Israelis did in 1954 when they repealed the death penalty, since 1967, all they’ve done is refrain from applying the death penalty when it comes to Palestinians. That’s it. They’ve never ever repealed it. And so what’s the difference? It’s because the Israeli military government has always had in the back of their mind this ability to be able to use the death penalty.”16

Attempts to legislate the death penalty did not start in the aftermath of Operation al-Aqsa Flood on October 7, 2023.17 In fact, this particular bill was introduced on March 1, 2023, seven months earlier. Before that, Israeli lawmakers introduced bills to impose the death penalty on “terrorists” at least 22 times since 2004.18

Now, Buttu notes, Israel has abandoned the facade of being a Western liberal democracy and is going all in on a deeply unequal system.

Israel’s pattern of state violence against Palestinians intensified after the events of October 7, 2023, part of the genocide that followed. Israel’s incarceration system has become a new staging area for extrajudicial killings of Palestinians. Nearly 100 Palestinians have died in Israeli custody since October 7, according to Physicians for Human Rights—Israel.19 The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (UN OCHA) found that since 2008, 2,091 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), with numbers skyrocketing in 2023 and 2024. Human rights defenders warn this law is formalizing these extrajudicial killings.

“Death is being absolutely normalized and we see that there is absolutely no intention of holding anyone accountable,” Haddad said. “The legal system has legalized extrajudicial executions, and now we see what the law is trying to do is just legalize this killing through the court system . . . So the death penalty translates what’s already been happening from a practice into an explicit legal framework.”