‘Unprecedented act of savagery’: How Israel’s new law places Palestinians on death row by default

The death penalty provision applies only through the military courts, which means it applies exclusively to Palestinians. In the civilian track, the law only covers those acting with the intent to deny the existence of the State of Israel, a definition designed to exclude Jewish defendants.

The law operates across two legal orders that share only a maximum penalty, according to Qadri.

“Palestinian defendants in the West Bank face military courts where judges are uniformed officers, confessions extracted under interrogation constitute primary evidence, and the conviction rate is 96 percent.”

“Israeli defendants face civilian courts with independent judges, full evidentiary standards, and a Supreme Court appellate structure. Placing the same capital sanction across both frameworks without equalising the procedural conditions that determine whether it is applied fairly is a structural guarantee of differential outcomes,” Qadri explains.

The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination said the law rolls back Israel’s long-standing de facto moratorium on executions, in place since 1962, and noted with concern that it “prohibits mitigation, commutation or pardon of the death penalty” once a sentence is handed down. 

UN experts have warned that the mandatory nature of the sentence violates the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which Israel ratified in 1991, under which mandatory death sentences are prohibited as inherently arbitrary.

What it means for Palestinians behind bars

The law comes into force against a backdrop of severe and worsening conditions for Palestinians in Israeli arbitrary detention. 

As of March 2026, approximately 9,500 Palestinians are held in Israeli prisons, with about half under administrative detention or labelled “unlawful combatants,” held without charge and unable to defend themselves in court. 

Palestinian prisoners’ rights groups have described the new law as an “unprecedented act of savagery,” accusing Israel of codifying violence against detainees amid mounting reports of torture and deaths in custody since the genocide in Gaza intensified.

“Administrative detention is a colonial relic, the bitter fruit of Britain’s 1945 Emergency Regulations, exported and perfected across an archipelago of twenty-five detention centres, prisons, and interrogation facilities, twenty-one of them inside Israel itself,” Qadri says.

“What the death penalty law changes is not the material conditions of detention; the torture, the medical neglect, the enforced disappearance of hundreds of families still unable to determine whether their loved ones are alive, detained, or dead; but the existential conditions, so that every unanswered question about a detained relative now carries the weight of an execution deadline,” he adds.

The Association for Civil Rights in Israel, alongside Adalah and several other rights organisations, has petitioned the High Court against the law, arguing it is racially discriminatory, unconstitutional, and that the Knesset has no authority to legislate directly for the occupied West Bank. 

The court has yet to issue a final ruling. In the meantime, the law is in force, and for Palestinians facing military prosecution, the death penalty is the default sentence the law prescribes.

“This is the precise function of what international law has failed to name, not merely to kill, but to make an exposed population live in permanent, calibrated proximity to death as a technique of control over the living,” Qadri says.

“The law is not addressed to the defendant; it is addressed to the population,” he adds.

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