On Monday, Israel passed a death penalty law, allowing it to execute those convicted of “terrorist crimes” within an accelerated period of 90 days.
The law comes as no surprise to Palestinians; This is just another step in a long-term strategy of eradication. Over the past two and a half years, at least 87 Palestinian detainees have been murdered, in what human rights organizations say is “network “Number of concentration camps” – the highest recorded number since 1967.
While UN bodies and various states have expressed concern and condemned, Palestinians understand this law for what it is: the institutionalization of a practice well underway.
Israel’s time: a message to the Palestinians
Not only are the provisions of the law important, but also the context in which it is passed. This comes less than a month after Israel dropped all charges against its soldiers accused of mass raping Palestinian detainees in the notorious detention camp of Sde Timan.
This is not accidental. Israel is legitimizing a system of impunity. One population has been given blanket immunity for organized sexual violence, while another population can now be executed within 90 days, in a military court system that convicts 96 percent of Palestinians – often on the basis of confessions extracted through torture.
It also comes at a time of visible and intense Israeli violence in the occupied West Bank. In the past month alone, and with the United States and Israel at war over Iran, armed Israeli militias committed more than 7,300 violations against Palestinians in the West Bank alone, including killings, raids, arrests, property damage and destruction, and blocking freedom of movement.
In late 2023, the entire population of Khirbet Zanuta in the southern West Bank was driven out after persistent settler attacks made it impossible to survive. In the north, in 2025, refugee camps have been destroyed, depopulated and converted into Israeli military bases. Illegal Israeli settlements that were previously destroyed are being rebuilt and are being legally recognized by Israel.
Not only has the frequency of Israeli attacks against Palestinians increased in recent months, but the violence has also become more brutal and brutal.
Between January and March, Israeli settlers and soldiers abducted children, committed massacres, sexually assaulted Palestinian men – even tying up their genitals and marching them through their villages – and outright killed Palestinian families.
Not a single Israeli has been held responsible for these crimes. Meanwhile, Palestinians are being displaced from their homes, and those who have attempted to defend their communities from settler attacks have been arrested by Israeli forces.
The message of the death penalty law is well-intentioned and precise: in the Israeli legal system, Palestinians have no rights. Their removal, either by displacement, death, or exhaustion, is the desired result.
Destroying the Palestinian ability to protest
For decades, Israel has been criticized and condemned for its discriminatory legal framework against Palestinians in the West Bank and even Palestinians with Israeli citizenship.
Yet this segregation is not simply meant to assert racial domination, but rather to facilitate systemic breakdown. According to a UN report released in January, such Israeli laws are designed to erode Palestinian self-determination and destroy prospects for territorial, political or cultural continuity.
The death penalty law is consistent with Israel’s long-standing practice of apartheid and a segregated justice structure. It is carefully worded to ensure that it applies only to Palestinians.
The most dangerous element of this law is not its discriminatory structure – but the logic underlying it. The law imposes the death penalty or life imprisonment on “anyone who knowingly causes the death of another with the intent to cause harm to a citizen or resident of Israel with the intent to deny the existence of the State of Israel”.
That section alone does some remarkable things. This is not criminalizing violence, but rather the political condition of being a Palestinian under Israeli occupation.
As a colonialist-expansionist state, what Israel is saying is that the people being systematically dispossessed do not even have the right to protest against that dispossession. With this, a Palestinian watching his village being systematically emptied by armed settlers who face no legal consequences for attack and murder can now be hanged because his desire to survive and protect his loved ones has been designated as a death penalty crime.
Israeli policymakers are ensuring that resistance becomes impossible, amid the slow but rapid population growth of Palestinian towns and villages. With this, what Israel is actually doing is institutionalizing the non-existence of the people.
Death penalty law is about land grabs
To understand the death penalty law as a policy focused solely on prisoners is to completely miss its purpose. Palestinians are already being executed in their own homes and on the streets without any court, without charge, and without a 90-day waiting period.
This law, the legalization of settlements, military courts, the demolition order, and the siege of Gaza should not be seen as separate policies responding to separate problems. These are the instruments of a single project, the total conquest of Palestinian lands through complete control over Palestinian bodies. They each target different bodies in different contexts but work on the same agenda.
Instead of a dramatic act of destruction, Israel is creating a reality where Palestinians cannot live on the land and cannot survive attempts to resist their eradication. This law adds a new layer to the entire infrastructure of eradication that is already underway.
The death penalty for Palestinians did not begin with this law. It began with the first Israeli settlement.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.
