Published: 3 April 2026<\/p>\n
Last updated: 3 April 2026<\/p>\n
With Israel\u2019s passage of a law specifying hanging as the punishment for murder of Israelis by Palestinians, bitter consequences loom on both sides of the Green Line.<\/p>\n
Inside Israel, the law\u2019s passage promises to fuel the governing coalition\u2019s anti-democratic drive to eliminate checks on its power. At the same time, the law is already further escalating tensions among Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.<\/p>\n
Touted by Far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir as a deterrent to Palestinian attacks, the law stipulates death by hanging for terrorists who kill \u201cout of an intention to negate the existence of the state of Israel\u201d. That wording will exclude from execution Jewish terrorists who murder Palestinians during burgeoning settler violence or under other circumstances.<\/p>\n
The idea is that only Palestinians get hung.<\/p>\n
While hanging is the default punishment, the court is permitted to apply life imprisonment to Palestinians if there are \u201cspecial circumstances.\u201d But these are not specified.<\/p>\n
Although the IDF carries out extrajudicial killings of those it defines as security threats, judicial executions have been shunned since Nazi holocaust mastermind Adolf Eichman was hung in 1962.\u00a0Israel used to take pride in this record.<\/p>\n
Now there is a sense that the law\u2019s passage is accelerating the society\u2019s moral deterioration. \u201cOne of the tests of a cultured society is that it doesn\u2019t hang people,\u201d said Salim Brake, a political scientist at the Open University.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a slippery slope,\u201d he added. \u201cIt starts with Palestinians and then it could be other enemies at home,\u201d Brake said.<\/p>\n
Talya Sasson, former director of the New Israel Fund, said the law tramples on Israel\u2019s declaration of independence which projects that the state will express just values and equality while being a country for the Jewish people. She said one danger is that the death penalty law will be a law that shapes the values of Israeli youth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Published: 3 April 2026 Last updated: 3 April 2026 With Israel\u2019s passage of a law specifying hanging as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":373168,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[85,46,43],"class_list":{"0":"post-373167","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-israel","8":"tag-il","9":"tag-israel","10":"tag-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=373167"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373167\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/373168"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=373167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=373167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=373167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}