Israeli lawmakers have approved setting up a livestreamed special tribunal with the power to sentence to death Palestinians convicted of taking part in the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023 that triggered the war in Gaza.
The measure was passed by 93 votes to none in the 120-seat Knesset, Israel’s parliament, reflecting widespread support among Israel’s Jewish majority for punishing those found responsible for the deadliest single attack in Israel’s history. The remaining 27 lawmakers were absent or abstained from voting.
The bill is separate from a law passed in March that approved use of the death penalty for Palestinians convicted of murdering Israelis, a measure harshly condemned by the international community and rights groups as discriminatory and inhumane.
The October 2023 attack, led by elite “Nukhba” force fighters of Hamas, was the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust. At least 1,200 people were killed, the majority of them civilians.
During the attack and in its aftermath, Israeli forces captured about 300 alleged attackers inside Israel, who have been held since then.
Under the new legislation, the tribunal will be able to charge the alleged assailants under Israel’s 1950 law for the prevention of genocide, which carries the death penalty.
Rights groups have criticised the measure, saying it makes the death penalty too easy to impose while also doing away with procedures safeguarding the right to a fair trial. Defendants can appeal against their sentences but the appeals have to be heard by a separate, special appeals court rather than regular appeals courts.
Ya’ara Mordecai, an international law expert at Yale Law School, said the new law raised some concerns about due process, given the military court setting, as well as a risk of atrocity proceedings turning into politicised or symbolic “show trials”.
Because the bill empowers a panel of judges to hand down the death penalty by a majority vote, and requires the trials to be conducted in a livestreamed Jerusalem courtroom, it has drawn comparisons to the 1962 trial of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, which was broadcast live on television and in which Eichmann was sentenced to death in a civilian court.
Eichmann’s execution was the last time the death penalty was carried out in Israel, though capital punishment remains on the books for acts of genocide, espionage during wartime and certain terror offences.
While military courts theoretically retained the ability to hand down a death sentence, a legacy of British colonial regulations, it was handed down just once to a member of the Palestine Liberation Organisation and then commuted.
Instead, as Smadar Ben-Natan, an Israeli and international legal scholar, pointed out in an essay for Haaretz before the vote, the Eichmann case was seen as an example of “a unique historical injustice” to which no other crime could be compared. That framing has changed for some in Israel’s coalition government who depict Hamas as the “new Nazis.”
Opponents of the bill also say livestreaming the proceedings before guilt is established risks turning the trials into a spectacle. They have raised questions about the reliability of the evidence that may be presented, saying it could have been extracted by harsh interrogation methods.
Simcha Rothman, one of the bill’s sponsors, said the overwhelming consensus for the bill in the Knesset showed Israeli lawmakers could come together “around a common mission”.
Several Israeli rights groups including HaMoked, Adalah and the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel said on Monday that while “justice for the victims of October 7 is a legitimate and urgent imperative,” any accountability for the crimes “must be pursued through a process which includes rather than abandons the principles of justice”.
A Hamas spokesperson, Hazem Qassem, said the new law “serves as a cover for the war crimes committed by Israel in Gaza”.
The international criminal court is investigating Israel’s conduct of the Gaza war and has issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and the former defence minister Yoav Gallant, as well as three Hamas leaders who have all since been killed by Israel.
Israel is also fighting a genocide case at the international court of justice. It rejects the allegations as politically motivated and has argued that its war is against Hamas, not the Palestinian people.
Reuters and Associated Press contributed to this report
