Under the Genocide Convention, destruction may be carried out through the creation of conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction — such as starvation — or through direct killing. In this sense, starvation constitutes a collective, slow and silent execution, whereas the death penalty law represents the swift judicial gallows. Both derive from the same criminal intent identified by international courts. If the state claims the authority to starve millions of Palestinians in Gaza, it is unsurprising that it now seeks the authority to execute Palestinians in Israeli prisons via a mandatory death penalty, stripping judges of discretion and prohibiting sentence mitigation — including clemency.
An additional domestic judicial layer must be considered. In a ruling issued by the Israeli High Court of Justice in March 2025, rejecting petitions by human rights organizations to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza, Supreme Court Justice David Mintz echoed the rhetoric of political leaders and infused it with religious-national content. In dismissing the petition, Mintz referred to Israel’s campaign as a “commanded war” against “Amalek.”
The link between Mintz’s ruling and the death penalty law approved one year later centralizes the same components. When a Supreme Court justice invokes the term Amalek, they legitimize political rhetoric dehumanizing Palestinians. In a “commanded war” against “Amalek,” the state’s obligations are not derived from human rights, but from a perceived command of annihilation.
In this context, recall that two months after the court rejected the humanitarian aid petition, the same human rights organizations filed a renewed petition demanding that the state allow aid into Gaza. In September 2025, after observing that the court was not expediting the case and was granting the state repeated extensions to respond, the organizations withdrew their petition and, for the first time, requested that it be dismissed without adjudication. They argued that the court’s policy of “endless delays” amid starvation in Gaza meant that it no longer functioned as a judicial body but as an instrument granting “legal approval” to Israeli policy — effectively facilitating the commission of genocide in Gaza. It is no coincidence that the ICC’s December 2025 decision rejecting Israel’s appeal against Netanyahu’s arrest warrant also dismissed Israel’s claim of complementarity, reasoning that the Israeli judicial system could no longer fairly adjudicate justice for violations against Palestinians.
This policy of endless delay may have been replicated in the High Court’s first decision against petitions challenging the death penalty law and seeking interim relief to suspend its implementation. The following day, Justice Yehiel Kasher refused to issue a temporary injunction halting the law’s implementation, granting the State Attorney’s Office an extended period until the end of May 2026 to respond. While the court grants the state two months to reply, the execution mechanism comes into force.
The law itself establishes a draconian timetable enabling executions within as little as 90 days. This is not merely a procedural decision. The refusal to issue an immediate injunction constitutes the procedural-judicial implementation of the Amalek doctrine against Palestinians. Within a framework of dehumanization, there is no legal urgency to protect Palestinian life — neither from starvation nor execution. Thus, a unified front emerges across all state branches: The government defines the motive and intent; the Knesset translates intent into repressive legislative frameworks; and the judiciary provides the procedural and legal framework legitimizing the ideological structure.
In a reality where dehumanization is openly declared and embedded across the Israeli authorities, the international community must adopt positive measures of restraint, demanding genuine accountability and lifting the immunity shielding crimes committed against Palestinians. Silence, or reliance on mere rhetoric as death transforms into legal procedure, is not a diplomatic failure; it constitutes a breach of the international obligation to prevent genocide and grants impunity to a project of persecution. States must adopt concrete enforcement measures that illustrate to the Israeli government that impunity for dehumanization and persecution carries real international consequences — before this new law claims its first victims.
The views and positions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of DAWN.