Israel, Apartheid and the Death Penalty, Codifying War on Palestinian Life
Rezgar Akrawi
On March 30, 2026, the Israeli Knesset passed a law imposing death by hanging on Palestinian prisoners and detainees convicted by military courts in cases involving lethal attacks, with the sentence to be carried out within ninety days of conviction. This is not a criminal law. It is a codified tool of ethnic cleansing operating within a documented apartheid system.
What distinguishes this law is not that it significantly increases the number of victims; extrajudicial killing has been an entrenched Israeli practice for decades. What is new is that the state has elevated killing from a concealed practice into a declared policy, codified with a parliamentary stamp. The significance lies in the brazenness of public normalization, not in the invention of new mechanisms of execution.
Apartheid here is not a rhetorical description or a poetic exaggeration. It is a precise legal term defined in international law as a system of systematic institutional domination by one national group over another, based on discrimination in rights, movement, and legal existence. This system enjoys unprecedented American political cover.
To understand what has happened, we cannot begin with the law alone. We must begin with the entire structure that produced it, the capitalist system that protects it, and the organized Western hypocrisy that prolongs its life.
1. The Death Penalty, The Cheapest Solution for a Failed State
From my principled and human position, I reject the death penalty completely and categorically. The right to life is an inherent right, inseparable from a person’s humanity, and no state, no matter what legitimacy it claims, has the right to take it away. This rejection does not waver when the law comes from a state that presents itself as democratic, nor does it waver when it comes from a state that practices vile national oppression in full view of the world and with its implicit blessing.
No one is born a criminal or violent. Every human being is born in a state of complete innocence. It is certain conditions and circumstances that turn a person into a criminal: poverty, unemployment, the absence of social protection, tyranny, in addition to national, religious, and class discrimination and oppression. The death penalty provides failed governments with a ready-made pretext to evade their real responsibility in addressing the underlying roots of crime and violence.
In the context of vile national discrimination, it goes even further: it is a tool for liquidating resistance, criminalizing the victim, and turning a people subjected to oppression into defendants before the very courts of their oppressors, in a scene where the absence of justice reaches its absolute extreme.
It is the easiest and least costly solution, while addressing the roots of crime and violence is costly and requires serious and genuine work, something corrupt and incapable authorities do not seem interested in undertaking.
When that authority is founded on injustice and national discrimination, the question of the roots of violence becomes an eminently political question, because the answer is already known in advance: the root of violence is oppression itself, the poverty it creates, the displacement it produces, and the daily humiliation it feeds.
The death penalty is, in its essence, a violent, retaliatory, and inhuman punishment, based on the logic of revenge, not on the logic of rehabilitation and reform. It is also, by its very nature, a class-based and discriminatory punishment everywhere and at all times.
The overwhelming majority of those sentenced to death in the world belong to working-class people, marginalized communities, and national and religious minorities, those who cannot afford lawyers and have no connection to centers of power and influence.
We rarely hear of a wealthy person or someone with political weight being executed for a criminal offense. This is not a coincidence. It is the very essence of the system itself, which protects the privileged and punishes the dispossessed.
Moreover, it is an irreversible punishment in a world where courts are tainted by grave judicial errors, and where the majority of confessions are extracted under coercion, torture, and psychological and physical pressure. When the death penalty is carried out against an innocent person, there is no possible return and no compensation, and this alone is enough to reject this punishment at its root.
How much worse is the situation when the court is not independent to begin with, but is itself part of the machinery of national oppression and one of its instruments.
The societies that are most humane in their treatment of crime and most just in the distribution of wealth are the ones most capable of reducing violence. Killing in the name of the law does not produce security. It produces a state that masters revenge and fails at reform, a state that entrenches through execution a culture of death and killing and spreads it throughout society.
When such a state is founded on injustice and vile national discrimination, this culture of killing does not remain confined within its borders. It becomes a model exported, legitimized, and emulated by every system of domination searching for legal cover for its crimes.
This position is not limited to Israel. The death penalty is widespread across the Middle East, North Africa, and much of Asia. Saudi Arabia is among the world’s leading executioners, with a striking proportion of death sentences falling on impoverished migrant workers from Asia and Africa, as well as political opponents and anyone deemed a threat to the ruling order.
Palestinian factions also apply this punishment, most notably Hamas, which has carried out field executions on various charges. All of this makes the rejection of the death penalty a comprehensive humanitarian principle, not a selective political stance directed at one party over another. The right to life is indivisible regardless of who violates it.
2. The New Law, From Practiced Killing to Codified Killing
The current Israeli government is the most right-wing, most extreme, and most racist in the entire history of Israel. Its cabinet includes ministers who describe Palestinians in language that explicitly strips them of their humanity, and who openly defend forced displacement, annexation, and physical extermination as official state policies.
These ministers do not hide their intentions, nor do they soften their rhetoric, and yet they sit at international conference tables and are received in certain Western capitals. This glaring contradiction between most Western capitalist discourse on human rights and its actual practice is the true face of international politics when it collides with strategic interests.
This government was not born in a vacuum, nor did it rule in isolation. It has reached this level of audacity in codified crime because it knows that it is protected to a large extent at the international level, and that the price it will pay will not, so far, be high enough to alter its calculations.
The most important political cover today comes from Washington. The Trump administration, which expresses American national-populist right-wing politics in its most unrestrained form, provides Israel with unconditional strategic support that surpasses everything previous American administrations granted it. Historical honesty, however, requires stressing that this support is not a Trumpian invention.
It has been nurtured by Democratic and Republican administrations alike, even if its degrees and forms have varied. What Trump has done is raise the ceiling of this support to a new level of shamelessness and publicity, stripping it of every diplomatic fig leaf that had previously softened its impact.
This support is not merely a diplomatic stance. It is an organic ideological alliance between two racist right-wing movements that are closely aligned at their core: both regard national domination as a source of legitimacy, both use the discourse of security and terrorism to justify crimes against oppressed peoples, both work to dismantle international oversight institutions that might hold them accountable, and both represent different expressions of a single capitalist order that places the interests of domination above every human or legal consideration.
Washington and Tel Aviv appear here as two inseparable expressions of one system that makes force into law, national injustice into civilization, and resistance into terrorism.
This alliance gives the Israeli right everything it needs to escalate its violations: protection in the Security Council through the repeated and systematic American veto, media cover through the digital machinery of the American right that reframes genocide as self-defense, and international support that presents vile national discrimination as legitimate defense and apartheid as a security necessity, and that treats an explicit racist law as part of the system of international governance.
What is new here does not lie in the act itself. Israel has for decades practiced extrajudicial execution through assassinations, field liquidations, and the direct bombardment of civilian populations. Many of these operations killed dozens of civilians surrounding their alleged targets, turning them into a form of mass execution wrapped in the language of security and deterrence.
The most blatant and outrageous model of all is what has been taking place in Gaza since October 2023, where the number of direct victims exceeded seventy thousand according to initial documented figures for the first year alone, while peer-reviewed scientific studies including those published in The Lancet estimate the overall toll, when indirect deaths from the collapse of the healthcare system, famine, and disease are counted, to be many times higher. The overwhelming majority of the victims are civilians, in a scene explicitly described by UN officials and international law experts as genocide.
What makes this scene even more horrifying is that many targeting operations were carried out through artificial intelligence systems and pre-programmed algorithms that choose targets and issue kill orders without real human intervention, in an unprecedented development in which mass execution was turned into an automated decision carried out at the press of a button. This is not a military operation.
It is a fascist form of mass extrajudicial execution without any trial, carried out before the eyes of the world.
What is new today is that the state no longer confines itself to killing in secret. It now does so openly, granting it legislative legitimacy and incorporating it into its declared legal arsenal. This is not courage in admitting what is happening on the ground. It is audacity in normalizing and legalizing crimes in their filthiest forms.
3. The Settlement Movement, From the Margins to the Heart of Decision-Making
This escalation cannot be separated from the growing role of the racist settlement movement in the West Bank, which over the decades has transformed from clusters on the margins of the political map into an influential political force within the very structure of the Israeli state. This movement did not reach this pivotal position in isolation from the international context.
It grew and flourished under continuous American funding, uninterrupted economic partnerships, and normal diplomatic relations that were never severed even in the worst and most aggressive phases of settlement expansion. This movement now pushes toward more extreme policies, and drives the expansion of tools of repression and punishment, including harsher legislation such as the law recently passed.
This transformation is the product of a systematic strategy to build a demographic and political presence in Palestinian territory, accompanied by ongoing government funding and permanent military protection.
Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories constitute a clear and documented violation of international law, and this is an unambiguous legal judgment. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits an occupying power from transferring its citizens into the territory it occupies.
The International Court of Justice confirmed in its advisory opinion of 2024 that the continuing Israeli occupation and the establishment of settlements are unlawful under international law, and called for their termination. UN Security Council Resolution 2334, issued in 2016, unanimously affirms that the settlements have no legal validity and constitute a major obstacle to peace.
On the ground, the number of settlers today exceeds seven hundred thousand people, in a situation that fragments Palestinian geographic continuity and turns the West Bank into isolated islands. Despite all this, many Western states continue to import settlement goods, finance companies operating there, and conclude trade agreements with Israel, proving that their verbal condemnation of settlement expansion is not worth the ink with which it was written.
Representatives of this movement today hold key ministerial portfolios, and what used to be considered a marginal extremist agenda has become, to a large extent, official state policy translated into binding laws that directly affect the lives and rights of Palestinians.
4. The Dual Legal Structure, Two Paths to Execution
This law does not emerge in a legal vacuum. It falls within a dual legal structure that has existed for years, based on two different tracks that may lead to death sentences. The civil track inside Israel defines certain acts within the framework of terrorism and sets special legal conditions that may theoretically open the way to applying the penalty.
This track may include some Palestinian Arabs inside Israel, or prisoners and detainees held in connection with events such as October 7, 2023, according to some analyses. The military track, meanwhile, is applied in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to Palestinians subjected to a system of vile national discrimination, within a completely separate judicial order that is governed neither by the standards of civil justice nor by its elementary guarantees.
This legal dualism reflects a deliberate repressive structure that places two human groups under two radically different legal systems: one system for the settler and another for the oppressed, one system for the person with full rights and another for the one who has been turned into a security threat merely by existing on the land of his ancestors.
The death penalty in Israel is not entirely new, but historically it was nearly frozen and rarely applied, and was used only in extremely limited exceptional cases, most notably the execution of Adolf Eichmann in 1962. The current transformation does not consist merely in reactivating it.
It goes further, expanding its scope, facilitating its application, and stripping its victims of every procedural guarantee, within a political and repressive context that leaves no room for interpretation as to its true intentions.
What this abhorrent law criminalizes is not crime in its true legal sense. It criminalizes resistance itself in all its forms. Those who fall into captivity should be treated under international humanitarian law as prisoners of war, not as criminal offenders, and this is a status guaranteed by the Third Geneva Convention, one that the occupying power deliberately ignores in order to transform a liberation struggle into a crime warranting execution.
The Palestinian in the territories under Israeli occupation is not tried before a system of legal equality. He is tried before a military court operating within a structure of vile national oppression, stripped of the most basic guarantees of a fair trial, with conviction rates approaching totality according to Israeli and international human rights organizations, and with the majority of confessions extracted under coercion and psychological and physical pressure.
These courts are not justice in any real sense of the word. They are a bureaucratic procedure that gives a false legal appearance to decisions taken in advance in other rooms.
5. Details of the Law, Brutal Execution Without Guarantees
What distinguishes this law from other criminal legislation is not just the punishment in itself. It is the systematic and deliberate design to remove every legal guarantee that might prevent its implementation. The public prosecutor does not need to request the application of the death penalty, and a simple approval from a panel of three military officers is enough to issue a death sentence.
Judges are required to record exceptional justifications if they wish to replace execution with life imprisonment, which turns the logic of justice upside down in a way that reveals the true nature of this law: execution has become the default and mercy the exception, meaning that the judge must justify why not to kill, not why to kill.
The avenues of appeal and review are severely restricted, with any possibility of pardon eliminated, while those convicted are held in near-total isolation with harsh restrictions on the right to legal representation, as the lawyer is allowed to communicate with the client only through a video call, in a flagrant mockery of the principle of confidentiality between the accused and counsel.
Alongside this enacted law, there is another bill still under preparation before the Knesset, known as the law on prosecuting participants in the events of October 7. It creates exceptional military courts with retroactive powers to prosecute those accused of participating in the attacks of October 7, 2023. These courts are authorized to depart from standard rules of evidence and procedure, and to impose the death penalty by simple majority without the public prosecutor requesting it.
Taken together, the two laws constitute an unprecedented expansion in the scope of execution, remove some of the procedural guarantees that had constrained its application for decades, and represent as a whole a qualitative leap in the path of entrenching legal extermination in its most fascist forms.
Conviction is nearly predetermined before the trial even begins. By contrast, the Jewish Israeli citizen who commits documented crimes against Palestinians, including killing, displacement, and the burning of villages, is tried within a completely different legal system, or is not tried at all, as investigations into most settler crimes frequently end in files being shelved and closed without accountability.
This discrimination is not a flaw that can be corrected by amending a text. It is the essence of a legal structure that divides human beings into unequal categories of life and rights, which constitutes at its core the precise legal definition of apartheid.
When such a system is given the authority to execute a person within ninety days on the basis of a military trial with near-automatic conviction rates, we are not dealing with a criminal law. We are confronting a codified tool of ethnic cleansing bearing the parliament’s signature and the state’s seal.
6. Apartheid, A Legal Characterization from the Ground of Reality
Describing Israel as a system of racial segregation is no longer merely a political discourse. It has become a documented legal characterization supported by major international human rights organizations. In its 2022 report, Amnesty International concluded that Israel practices a system of apartheid against Palestinians based on systematic oppression and institutional discrimination, extending across the Palestinian territories and within Palestinian communities inside Israel itself. Human Rights Watch also confirmed in its 2021 report that the Israeli authorities are committing the crimes of apartheid and persecution through policies aimed at entrenching the domination of one national group over another.
In 2024, the International Court of Justice issued a historic advisory opinion affirming that the continuing Israeli occupation is unlawful under international law and calling for its immediate end, in an international legal precedent that has not yet found its way into any enforcement measure.
These conclusions come from reputable international organizations and recognized international courts, working according to rigorous legal methodologies and precise field documentation. They are not ideological publications by pressure groups.
They can only be rejected by invoking the same defensive logic once used by the architects of apartheid in South Africa when they described international criticism as interference in internal affairs and as a failure to understand the particularity of their security situation. History judged those people, and it will judge these as well.
On the ground, this system is manifested in an integrated set of tools: laws under which Palestinian land is granted to settlers and confiscated under the pretext of absentee property and other devices, a permit regime that tightens its grip on Palestinian movement between their cities, villages, and workplaces, a separation wall whose illegality was confirmed by international justice itself, Jerusalem neighborhoods whose homes are demolished in order to replace them with settlers, and the siege of Gaza, which has turned the Strip into an open prison where two million people live in conditions documented internationally as a deliberate humanitarian catastrophe. This is not a temporary security policy. It is a permanent structure designed to entrench national and racial domination.
The bitter irony is that most Western governments that acknowledge these reports and praise their methodology continue their diplomatic and economic relations with the state they describe as apartheid, in a double standard that can only be explained by the logic of naked capitalist strategic interest. When the new death penalty law is placed within this context, it becomes clear that it is a logical link within an integrated system of domination that controls land, movement, and identity, and that today adds direct control over the right to life itself. Apartheid does not merely suppress the other.
It works to undermine his human value to the point of making him fit for subjugation and extermination, without provoking a proportionate moral response from most of the major powers that sponsor this system, fund it, arm it, and content themselves with weak verbal condemnation whenever its brutality intensifies and exceeds the limits of what can be overlooked in the media sphere.
7. Comprehensive Global Isolation, The Weapon the Apartheid System Fears
The apartheid system in South Africa did not fall because of a sudden awakening among its ruling elites, nor did it fall because of the verbal condemnations issued by many Western capitals with one hand while economic relations with Pretoria continued with the other.
It fell under the weight of accumulated pressures coming from multiple directions: comprehensive international isolation, political, economic, academic, and cultural, when that isolation was real rather than rhetorical, a long and costly internal struggle, and a gradual erosion of the regime’s legitimacy when the costs of isolation began to affect expanding sections of white society itself.
This is the historical lesson that cannot be ignored, and current experience proves that the West knows it well and deliberately ignores it when it comes to Israel.
Today, every state in the world is called upon to impose comprehensive international isolation on the Israeli apartheid state. This is not a call for symbolic solidarity or quickly forgotten rhetorical declarations.
It is not a demand for more written statements and condemnations that have proven utterly incapable of changing anything on the ground. It is the description of a binding political and moral obligation for every state that claims to respect international law and human rights.
Severing diplomatic relations, imposing economic sanctions, freezing arms agreements, withdrawing investments, imposing academic, cultural, and sports boycotts, and prosecuting officials before international courts are all available, necessary, and lawful tools.
The current international situation reveals that there is a real and tangible shift worthy of note and appreciation: many European states have begun moving beyond the limits of verbal statements toward bolder and more effective positions, taking concrete steps in the direction of recognizing Palestinian rights and pressuring Israel.
In Latin America, a wide wave of courageous positions has emerged, leading the world in rejecting the Israeli apartheid system and demanding accountability. This shift in public opinion and in the international mood proves that accumulated popular pressure produces real results, and that balances of power are not fixed.
By contrast, many Western states, and even some Arab states, continue to strengthen their relations with Israel and mute their practical criticism out of fear of right-wing American pressure and out of dread of accusations of anti-Semitism, which have become a political weapon for silencing every legitimate criticism.
That is why popular pressure in these countries, through social movements, forces of the left and progress, human rights organizations, and labor and mass unions, remains the necessary tool to break this complicit silence and compel governments to move from verbally condemning the apartheid system to actually demanding its isolation and dismantlement.
At the same time, external pressure alone is not enough. Any radical change requires the struggle of all those living on this land, Arabs and Jews and all other nationalities and religions, against the system itself.
The voices of the left and of progressives among the inhabitants of the country who reject this path do exist, and they pay a heavy price in their own society for opposing it. These are voices that deserve support, solidarity, and joint work.
8. The State of Citizenship, Neutralizing Nationalism and Religion from the State
The struggle against this racist death penalty law is not an isolated legal battle. It is part of a broader and deeper struggle aimed at dismantling the entire structure of national-religious discrimination and domination, and at searching for a real alternative that places the human being, not identity, at the center of the state and the law.
Building a genuine and equal state of citizenship is not a romantic slogan or a utopian wish. It is the most realistic and just political option for those who truly want to get out of this historical impasse rather than merely manage it and reproduce it generation after generation.
A democratic secular state in which Arab, Jew, Christian, Muslim, secular, atheist, and others are equal citizens before one law, in which nationalism and religion are neutralized from authority and transferred to the sphere of personal freedom and cultural life.
Nationalism is a cultural identity, and religion is a personal conviction. Every human being has the right to carry them and take pride in them, but they stop at that point and do not become a source of legal privilege or a justification for rights above the rights of others.
A state that derives its legitimacy from one particular religious or national identity inevitably turns into an instrument of exclusion against everyone who does not belong to it, and this is exactly what produced the Israeli apartheid system and continues to nourish it to this day. This is a lesson taught not only by ideas, but also by long authoritarian nationalist experiences in the same region.
This approach does not imply any equivalence between occupier and displaced person, nor any moral equality between a state practicing apartheid and a people resisting under siege, repression, and occupation.
The issue is in truth immensely complex, with intertwined historical, geographical, demographic, and legal dimensions, and it allows for multiple serious perspectives even within the ranks of the left itself. Yet I am inclined, on the basis of a reading of geographical and demographic reality, toward the view that a one-state solution under another name, based on equal citizenship, is the most just and realistic over the historical horizon, and that the two-state project on an ethnic basis as currently circulated deprives the Palestinian people of their rights and creates new problems instead of solving the existing ones.
The deep demographic intertwining between Palestinians and Jews on this land, the existence of more than two million Palestinians inside Israel who suffer documented institutional discrimination in their civil, political, and economic rights and for whom no partition-based solution offers a just answer, and the Palestinian geographic fragmentation produced by decades of forced displacement, which has shattered any geographic contiguity and makes the idea of a viable Palestinian state closer to illusion — all push toward this option.
At the center of all these considerations lies the right of return, that deeply rooted human and legal right guaranteed by UN Resolution 194, the right of millions of displaced Palestinians and their sons and daughters scattered in a forced diaspora extending from the camps of Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria to the far corners of the world. The state of equal citizenship is the only framework that allows genuine recognition of this right, because its reference point is citizenship, not ethnic majority.
Any serious approach must also acknowledge the broad and historically understandable Palestinian opposition to integration with settlers who occupied their land and continue to practice violence against them. This opposition is a legitimate political position rooted in lived experience. Nor can the comparison with South Africa be taken as straightforward: the proportion of non-indigenous residents in historic Palestine is far higher, and the depth of religious and nationalist extremism on both sides makes coexistence considerably more difficult. These obstacles must be acknowledged plainly, not glossed over.
And yet the question of what the real alternative is remains entirely legitimate. The two-state project has been made impossible by continuous settlement policies. The state of equal citizenship is not an easy path — it is arduous and long-term — but it remains the only framework capable of genuinely accommodating all the people of this land on the basis of real equality.
The debate over the optimal form of this state is legitimate and open, whether it takes the shape of a unified state under a new name with broad administrative decentralization guaranteeing the rights of all its components, or a federal entity guaranteeing self-rule for its components while preserving unity of citizenship and rights, or a confederal union between two entities equal in rights and sovereignty, or any other formula agreed upon by the people of this land through free will.
The only fixed standard in all these formulas is full equal citizenship and human rights, not national or religious identity. Religion is a private matter, not a matter of state, and nationalism is a cultural heritage celebrated in the social sphere.
This alternative is not a utopian dream detached from reality. It is today being discussed with growing seriousness among left and progressive forces worldwide, after the Israeli apartheid system has sabotaged the two-state project through its continuous settlement and aggressive policies.
Whoever says that this project is utopian should remember that no one once imagined that the apartheid system in South Africa would collapse despite all the enormous political, military, and economic power it possessed.
Yet local and global popular struggle, together with accumulated international pressure, proved that collapse is possible when real will and genuine solidarity exist. History does not move in a straight line, and systems that seem entrenched begin to crack when the cost of their continuation exceeds what can be borne.
9. Against a Logic, Not Only Against a Punishment
The discourse of the left and of liberation must be grounded in honest criticism, even in the harshest moments. Resistance to occupation and national injustice is a moral and legal duty beyond dispute, but this does not remove a parallel duty: frank criticism within the same camp.
The Palestinian experience itself offers two clear examples: one movement that sank into corruption and managed security coordination with the apartheid system until it lost its liberatory compass, and another that established a one-party order that imposed a form of religious guardianship over public life, while international human rights organizations documented the systematic violations of human rights committed by both sides.
Their internal fighting led to a political disaster that deepened Palestinian fragmentation and weakened the alternative project in the face of an enemy that fully exploits this division.
Movements that carry within their discourse the seeds of religious-national and political closure and authoritarianism, and that throw the masses into unequal wars in which innocent lives pay the highest price, do not build a genuine liberation project. Rather, at best, they may produce a reversed version of their enemy under another name.
Among the practices that demand explicit condemnation in this context are the field executions carried out by Hamas outside the bounds of any genuine judicial process, targeting Palestinians on charges of collaboration with the enemy, political opposition to the movement, or moral and religious pretexts, publicly documented by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
Beyond executions, there is a systematic pattern of violations encompassing torture, arbitrary detention, suppression of freedom of expression, and restrictions imposed on women and minorities.
These violations do not in any way diminish the brutality of the occupation’s crimes or reduce the justice of the liberation cause, but they constitute a betrayal of the very humanitarian principle on which that cause should stand, and they hand the apartheid system free ammunition to discredit the entire liberation project. Honest criticism therefore requires condemning them by name, with the same clarity and the same standard applied to the crimes of the occupier.
This criticism is not a retreat from the Palestinian right, nor is it any kind of questioning of the justice of the cause. It is a call to develop it toward alternatives that are more just, more humane, more rational, and open to socialist horizons, alternatives capable of building a genuine liberation project on the ground.
Hence comes the role of left and progressive forces in all their factions in putting forward the alternative of a secular state of citizenship, which cannot be built except on the shoulders of a liberation project grounded in neutralizing nationalism and religion from the state, and in equal citizenship, freedom, equality, and social justice as the standard for all without exception.
Justice is not achieved through killing or revenge. Crime and violence are social phenomena deeply rooted in injustice, poverty, displacement, and oppression accumulated across generations. When a state practicing vile national discrimination resorts to the death penalty against a people crushed under oppression, it is not addressing violence. It is inflaming it, reproducing it, and adding a new layer of injustice and grievance.
The true responsibility lies with the structure of national discrimination and oppression that produces violence and feeds it generation after generation.
The genuine struggle is not confined to one particular legal punishment, no matter how grave it may be. It targets an entire logic that turns the state into a tool of killing, the law into a cover for discrimination, and national belonging into a criterion for the value of life.
Those who feed this logic and protect it, whether through direct support or through timid condemnation that conceals actual complicity, bear their full historical and moral responsibility, whether they sit in Tel Aviv, Washington, Brussels, London, Paris, or in Arab capitals.
The struggle for the abolition of the death penalty, the dismantling of the Israeli system of discrimination and national injustice, and the isolation of the global alliance that protects it are not separate battles. They are multiple expressions of one liberation struggle that places every human being, without exception, at the center of value, right, and equality.
In this context, the abolition of the Israeli death penalty law issued on March 30, 2026 becomes an immediate and urgent demand, because it is a brutal and racist law, a codified tool of ethnic cleansing, a war crime, and a flagrant violation of international humanitarian law. Demanding its repeal is a moral and legal duty that falls upon all left, progressive, and human rights forces, and upon every state that claims to respect international law and human rights, alongside the duty to provide protection for Palestinian prisoners in the prisons of the Israeli system of national oppression.
Let us bring down the apartheid system in Israel, and let us execute the death penalty itself, not only in Israel but in every country of the region and the whole world. Let the death penalty itself be the last victim from which there is no return.
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Related links
I. The New Israeli Death Penalty Law
Amnesty International (March 30, 2026). Israel – Occupied Palestinian Territories: Newly Adopted Death Penalty Law Must Be Repealed. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2026/03/israel-opt-newly-adopted-death-penalty-law-must-be-repealed/
II. Israeli Apartheid
Amnesty International (February 2022). Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime against Humanity. https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/5141/2022/en/
Human Rights Watch (April 2021). A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution. https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/04/27/abusive-israeli-policies-constitute-crimes-apartheid-persecution
III. Gaza Death Toll
Khatib, L., McKee, M., & Yusuf, S. (July 2024). Counting the Dead in Gaza: Difficult but Essential. The Lancet, 404(10449), 2088–2089. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)01169-3/fulltext
Jamaluddine, Z., et al. (January 2025). Traumatic Injury Mortality in the Gaza Strip from Oct 7, 2023, to June 30, 2024: A Capture–Recapture Analysis. The Lancet, 405(10474), 243–253. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)02678-3/fulltext
IV. Genocide in Gaza — UN Reports
United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territory Occupied since 1967 (October 20, 2025). Gaza Genocide: A Collective Crime (A/80/492). https://www.un.org/unispal/document/special-rapporteur-report-gaza-genocide-a-collective-crime-20oct25/
V. Violations by Palestinian Armed Groups
Amnesty International (December 2025). Targeting Civilians: Murder, Hostage-Taking and Other Violations by Palestinian Armed Groups in Israel and Gaza (MDE 15/0282/2025). https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/0282/2025/en/
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