Summary Muslim countries, including Pakistan, condemned Israel’s West Bank death penalty law, citing discriminatory practices, prisoner abuses, and risks to regional stability
ISLAMABAD (Dunya News/Reuters) – A group of Muslim countries, including Pakistan, strongly condemned the Israeli occupying power’s enactment of a law in its Parliament (Knesset) that allows the imposition of the death penalty in the occupied West Bank and its de facto application against Palestinians.
The foreign ministers of Pakistan, Turkiye, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have issued a joint statement to condemn it.
The ministers warned against the increasingly discriminatory, escalating Israeli practices that entrench a system of apartheid and a rejectionist discourse that denies the inalienable rights and the very existence of the Palestinian people in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT).
They underscored that this legislation constituted a dangerous escalation, particularly given its discriminatory application against Palestinian prisoners, and stressed that such measures risk further exacerbating tensions and undermining regional stability.
The foreign ministers also expressed deep concern over the conditions of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli detention, warning of mounting risks amid credible reports of ongoing abuses, including torture, inhumane and degrading treatment, starvation, and the denial of basic rights. They emphasized that these practices reflect a broader pattern of violations against the Palestinian people.
The ministers reaffirmed their opposition to Israel’s racially discriminatory, oppressive, and aggressive policies targeting Palestinians.
The Ministers further emphasized the urgent need to refrain from measures imposed by the occupying power that risk further inflaming tensions on the ground.
They stressed the importance of ensuring accountability and called for strengthened international efforts to uphold stability and prevent further deterioration.
THE LAW
Reuters adds: Israel adopted a new law late Monday making the death penalty the default sentence for Palestinians convicted of lethal attacks. The law would also apply to Israeli citizens, but by defining the lethal attacks in question as those "negating Israel's existence" it would be very unlikely that it would be used against Jewish Israelis, critics say.
Palestinians in the occupied West Bank voiced fears on Tuesday that their jailed relatives could be hanged without due process.
The law is expected to be struck down by Israel's Supreme Court following an appeal by rights groups as it has elements in breach of an international convention, Israeli legal experts said, adding it is unlikely that any executions will actually be carried out.
The UN rights chief on Tuesday said the legislation violated international humanitarian law.
MILITARY COURTS HAVE 96% CONVICTION RATE
The law mandates execution specifically by hanging, a provision experts said was included over concerns Israeli doctors would refuse to conduct lethal injections. It would generally require execution within 90 days of sentencing, with no right to clemency.
The law provides judges the option to choose life imprisonment over capital punishment, but only in unspecified "special circumstances".
Israeli rights group B'Tselem says military courts in the West Bank, where only cases involving Palestinians are heard, have a 96% conviction rate and a history of extracting confessions under duress or even through torture. Israel denies this.
In the West Bank city of Ramallah, the families of Palestinian prisoners held a protest on Tuesday where they called for the death penalty law to be repealed.
SUPREME COURT LIKELY TO STRIKE DOWN LAW, EXPERTS SAY
The Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 – which Israel has ratified – says that persons condemned to death cannot be deprived of the right of petition for pardon and lays down a minimum of six months between sentence and execution.
Mordechai Kremnitzer, a law professor with the Israel Democracy Institute, said the law is "a clear case that invites the Supreme Court to strike it down."
"The likelihood of executions in the near future is not very high," Kremnitzer said. Judges are likely to show a negative attitude towards capital punishment because it runs against both universal morality and Jewish morality, he added.
SETTLER VIOLENCE
The legislation has drawn international criticism of Israel, which is already under scrutiny for increasing violence by settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank and for its conduct of the war against militant group Hamas in Gaza.
Israeli settlers' frequent attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank rarely end in military court indictments. Israeli monitoring organization Yesh Din said the last case they had recorded of an Israeli citizen indicted for killing a Palestinian was from an attack in 2018.
In Israel's civilian courts, where Palestinians can also face trial, the law would also impose death or life imprisonment for homicide with the intention of "negating Israel's existence" - a description unlikely to apply to a Jewish defendant.
"That's how the law will only apply to Palestinians," said attorney Debbie Gild-Hayo, of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, which petitioned the Supreme Court over the measure.
Suhad Bishara, the legal director at Adalah, a Palestinian human rights and legal aid centre based in Israel, said "military courts have no basic guarantees for a fair trial" and that Israel's parliament did not have jurisdiction to legislate in occupied territory.
Bishara also filed a petition to the Supreme Court disputing the law on behalf of Adalah, four other human rights organisations in Israel, and three members of the Knesset, separate from the one filed by ACRI.
NEW LAW WILL NOT APPLY TO OCTOBER 7 ATTACKERS
Raed Abu al-Hummus, the Palestinian Authority's minister for prisoners, estimated that 45 to 47 Palestinian detainees are awaiting sentencing on murder charges and may face the death sentence if the new law is implemented.
ACRI said that it would only apply to criminal acts of killing going forward, not retroactively.
It would also not apply to the hundreds of Hamas militants who took part in the October 7, 2023, attack that killed 1,200 people in southern Israel, ACRI's Gild-Hayo said, because the Israeli parliament is still working on legislation on the legal framework that will bring them to trial.
For Israel's far-right, the new law was a victory, fulfilling a main 2022 election campaign pledge by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
His Jewish Power party argues that the death penalty will deter Palestinians from carrying out deadly attacks against Israelis or attempting kidnappings with the aim of effecting swap deals for Palestinians jailed in Israeli prisons.
Amnesty International, which tracks countries imposing death penalty laws, says there "is no evidence that the death penalty is any more effective in reducing crime than life imprisonment."
