UN urges Israel to drop proposed death penalty bill against Palestinians News
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UN urges Israel to drop proposed death penalty bill against Palestinians

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk on Friday urged the Israeli government to abandon proposed legislation that would mandate death sentences exclusively for Palestinians in specific cases, for crimes committed either in Israel or the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

Türk stated that the proposed legislation is “inconsistent with Israel’s obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.” He delineated specific concerns over the “introduction of mandatory death sentences, which leave no discretion to the courts, and violate the right to life.”

The rights chief asserted that the proposal contravenes international humanitarian law, emphasizing that Israel has frequently violated the fair trial protections enshrined in the Fourth Geneva Convention for Palestinians in the West Bank or Gaza, and adding that this “amounts to a war crime.”

Türk also criticized the legislation’s “effect of applying the death penalty retroactively to those convicted of killings related to the horrific attacks on 7 October 2023, in violation of the principle of legality enshrined in international law.” Article 6(2) of the ICCPR states that a death sentence may be imposed only “in accordance with the law in force at the time of the commission of the crime.”

On November 10, the Knesset plenum approved in its first reading Penal Law Bill (Amendment No. 159) (Death Penalty for Terrorists) 2025, sponsored by Otzma Yehudit MK Limor Son Har-Melech. It includes a proposed amendment to the military law governing the occupied West Bank that would require military courts to impose mandatory death sentences for all convictions for intentional killing in the territory. Additionally, the legislation would amend the Israeli Penal Law to introduce the death penalty for the intentional killing of Israelis in an “act of terror.”  An Israel Prison Service (IPS) guard is to administer the death penalty through gunshot, electric chair, hanging or lethal injection.

Despite Israel’s 1991 ratification of the UN Convention against Torture, the nation has not yet codified a domestic statute that defines or criminalizes torture. Joel Zivot, a senior fellow in ethics at Emory University, commented that the execution of convicted Palestinians by lethal injection would constitute a cruel, torturous, and—under existing Israeli law—unlawful death.

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