Committee chairman Zvika Fogel urged \u201call members of the coalition\u201d to vote in favor of the bill in its final two readings.<\/p>\n
Haaretz reported that the committee was hoping to send the bill to the plenum as early as Monday, before the Knesset goes on recess for the Passover holiday.<\/p>\n
The bill passed its first reading in November and has since been under discussion by the committee in preparation for its subsequent readings in the plenum.<\/p>\n
Son Har-Melech\u2019s original bill<\/a> stipulated that Israeli courts must impose the death penalty on those who have committed a nationalistically motivated murder of a citizen of Israel, while allowing judges serving on military courts in the West Bank to sentence offenders to death with a simple majority, rather than a unanimous decision.<\/p>\n \t However, the bill has been subjected to numerous objections and proposed amendments from opposition lawmakers and the committee\u2019s legal adviser, who have argued that the bill is unconstitutional and discriminatory. More than 1,000 reservations were filed against the legislation, mostly by opposition lawmakers.<\/p>\n Significant changes were made last week to \u201csoften\u201d the bill following pressure<\/a> from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu\u2019s office, and with the support of the National Security Council, Shin Bet security agency and Foreign Ministry, which all argued that the draft was harsher than US capital punishment standards and could expose Israel to diplomatic and legal scrutiny abroad.<\/p>\n The revisions removed a clause mandating the death penalty without judicial discretion, meaning the bill now gives judges the option to choose between capital punishment and life imprisonment. Another change removed the requirement that trials take place in military courts, allowing them to be held in civil courts.<\/p>\n Finally, in a bid to avoid accusations of discrimination, lawmakers dropped language defining terror victims as \u201cIsraeli citizens,\u201d which would have applied the death penalty differently based on the victims\u2019 citizenship status and excluded Palestinian victims of Jewish terrorism.<\/p>\n While the death penalty formally exists in Israeli law, it has only ever been used once, in 1962 \u2014 in the case of senior Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust.<\/p>\n It is technically allowed in cases of high treason, as well as in certain circumstances under martial law that applies within the IDF and in the West Bank, but currently requires a unanimous decision from a panel of three judges, and has never been implemented.<\/p>\n
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\n\t\tNational Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir at a Knesset National Security Committee meeting, March 24, 2026. (Yonatan Sindel\/Flash90)<\/p>\n
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