Legalising murder: Israel’s shift from control to elimination

Israel has crossed a line it has long approached but never formally declared: legalising the killing of prisoners. In a system where Palestinian conviction rates in military courts are consistently reported by human rights organisations and legal experts to exceed 95%, often reaching as high as 99%, the death penalty is not a measure of justice, but a guarantee of death. To understand the gravity of this moment, one must first understand the scale and function of imprisonment in the Palestinian context.

Detention has never been merely a legal measure; it has been a central instrument of control. One in five Palestinians (20%) has been arrested or detained by Israeli authorities since the 1967 occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. This system of mass incarceration falls most heavily on Palestinian men, with estimates indicating that nearly two in every five (40%) have been arrested and charged over the course of their lives.

Under the current trajectory, and in the shadow of this new inhumane law, such detention risks being extended in prison time, and in consequence, transforming from prolonged incarceration into the possibility of state-sanctioned execution. Since October 2023, conditions within Israeli prisons have deteriorated dramatically. The findings of Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, point to widespread and systematic abuses against Palestinian men and women in Israeli prisons: rape, torture, sexual violence, humiliation, solitary confinement without access to family and deliberate medical neglect.

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These violations form part of a broader pattern made possible by sustained international inaction. Impunity is not incidental; it is enabling. Therefore, the newly-approved law must not be understood as something abnormal, but as a continuation.

For years, proposals to formalise the execution of Palestinian prisoners have circulated within the Israeli parliament, repeatedly amended, repeatedly delayed. The intent has not changed; it is the timing that has. At a moment when global attention is diverted by expanding regional tensions and shifting geopolitical priorities through the US-Israeli war against Iran, this far- right government has seized the opportunity to advance a measure that would have once provoked immediate international outrage.

The silence is not accidental. It is being relied upon. Palestinians know too well that execution has never been confined to courtrooms. Field executions, extrajudicial killings carried out with impunity, have long been a feature of life under occupation.

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