Israel’s parliament has voted to livestream special tribunals able to impose the death penalty on Gaza 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 30 March, the Knesset passed legislation requiring all Palestinians convicted of murdering Israelis in nationalist acts of 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 the killing of Palestinians, this year. They will be tried in military courts where the conviction rate is more than 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 support for the death penalty among left-wing politicians had followed the October 7 atrocities.
Israel has accepted that its forces killed 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 have 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” and described it as “de facto discriminatory” and warned 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.
The laws also come amid further efforts to ensure that the Palestinians are never able to establish a state alongside Israel, with a bill that proposes to abolish the Oslo accords.
The treaty started the failed peace process and was signed by Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, in 1993 alongside Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister then. Both men were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Rabin was later assassinated by an Israeli Jewish terrorist from the now-banned Kahane movement. But the heirs to its political agenda are now in Netanyahu’s coalition government.
The move to abolish peace agreements with the Palestinians is being led by Limor Sonn Har Melech, deputy speaker of the Israeli parliament and member of the Jewish Power Party.
It is opposed to all and any accommodation with the Palestinian people. Its members want to see Israel rule from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
Hamas advocates the use of violence to rid the region of Israel as a Jewish State, also using the slogan of “freedom” for Palestinians “from the river to the sea”.
Har Melech said that the purpose of the Oslo bill would be to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and allow for wider Jewish settlement on the occupied West Bank.
All Israeli settlements are illegal under international law.
When the Palestine Liberation Organisation, led by Arafat, recognised the state of Israel in 1993 and, along with Rabin, agreed to work towards peace and a state for both peoples, there were about 110,000 Israeli settlers on the West Bank.
Now there are about 530,000. There are an additional 200,000 in East Jerusalem, which, like the West Bank, was captured by Israel in 1967.
The Palestinian population of the West Bank is now governed by the Palestinian Authority, which is responsible for zones known as “area C”, mostly urban areas.
It is dominated by the Fatah party, which is currently having elections ahead of wider polls in the PA. Ironically, participants in both have to agree to respect the Oslo accords as a condition of taking part in elections.
Husam Zomlot, the Palestinian ambassador to London, has decried what he calls Israeli efforts to “collapse the PA” and has called for mass non-violent protest against the continued Israeli occupation.
Speaking to the World of Trouble podcast, he said: “We need to make sure that we find a way that is not war. But that has to be coupled with an international campaign similar to that of South Africa, to suck oxygen out of the settlements, out of the occupation. We cannot do it alone.
“Fatah understands that the first thing we need to do is the unity of our people and making sure our people remain on our land.
“Now, the effective mode is nonviolent resistance, but we have to redefine resistance. It’s important. Resistance is not just armed resistance.”
