Knesset advances bill establishing military tribunal to try October 7 perpetrators

The Knesset approved in a first reading 19-0 late Monday night a bill that would establish a special military tribunal to try perpetrators of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre.

The bill will now move for further discussion to the Knesset Constitution Law and Justice Committee, before returning to the full plenum for the second and third votes needed to pass it into law.

The legislation, which was submitted jointly by Religious Zionism MK Simcha Rothman, of the coalition, and Yisrael Beytenu MK Yulia Malinovsky, of the opposition, would see the establishment of a special court within the military justice system to try those who took part in the massacre.

As well as genocide charges, the special tribunal would be able to try suspects on charges of crimes against humanity, harm to state sovereignty, causing war, terrorism, murder, rape and hostage taking.

The tribunal will be able to try the dozens of Gazans captured in Israel between October 7 and October 14, 2023, suspected of being Hamas operatives for crimes listed under Israel’s 1950 Law for the Prevention of Genocide, which is based on the 1948 Genocide Convention and can carry a death sentence.

The legislation also states that suspects indicted or convicted by the tribunals could not be included in any future prisoner release deals.

The tribunal would be staffed by a total of 15 judges who are either qualified to serve on Israel’s Supreme Court or are international jurists whom the justice minister, in consultation with the foreign minister, deems have the appropriate qualifications to sit on such a panel.

An individual case would be heard by three judges — one of whom would be a retired district court judge — while a five-judge panel would hear proceedings involving multiple indictees. Appeals would be heard by all 15 judges.

The text of the legislation calls for civil court rules of procedure to be applied to the hearings, but to establish “exceptions to be detailed in an appendix,” with the court authorized to deviate from standard procedures “in exceptional cases.”

The hearings would be open to the public and broadcast live, the bill says.

“The unique scope and severity of the atrocities pose an unprecedented challenge to the Israeli justice system,” the bill’s authors wrote in its explanatory notes. “The investigation of the events is complex and exceptional in scale, inter alia due to the multiplicity of crime scenes, the large number of suspects, the large number of victims, and the manner of evidence collection, particularly during wartime.”

The establishment of the tribunal, they wrote, is designed to “allow for an efficient and appropriate criminal process, while safeguarding the interests of the victims and the public at large, and at the same time ensuring the conduct of a proper and fair legal proceeding.”

Speaking to the Knesset ahead of the vote early Tuesday morning, Rothman said that the funding of the attorneys who will be appointed to defend the suspects will be deducted from taxes that Israel collects on behalf of the Palestinian Authority.

Writing on X after the bill passed its initial reading, Malinovsky said that this marked “another step toward opening the October 7 trials, which will be broadcast to the entire world and will send the terrorists to the gallows.”

“The State of Israel will hold every participant in the massacre to account,” she added.

Justice Minister Yariv Levin stated in October, days after the release of the final living hostages in Gaza, that legislators could now advance the bill without concerns that doing so would risk the lives of the remaining captives.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas led an invasion of southern Israel in which 1,200 people were massacred. The thousands of terrorists who burst into the country also abducted 251 people as hostages to the Gaza Strip.

Terror operatives committed numerous atrocities during the savage invasion, many of which were documented by the terrorists themselves on bodycams they wore during the attack.

The IDF estimated that it killed more than 1,600 terrorists during the onslaught in Israel, and captured 149, who have been held in Israeli prisons and detention centers since.

Levin said last year that intensive work had been conducted since the Hamas invasion by the State Attorney’s Office, the police and the Shin Bet, which carried out comprehensive investigations into the terrorist operatives detained in Israel between October 7 and 14, and gathered “unprecedented volumes of evidence” against them.

This includes thousands of hours of video footage and thousands of hours of testimony, he stated. Draft indictments have now been produced for the alleged terrorist operatives based on this evidence.

But due to the large number of cases and the special circumstances of the crimes they are alleged to have committed, Levin said that a need arose to make a number of legislative amendments “to ensure that the legal process is conducted efficiently and that justice is both done and seen.”

Jeremy Sharon contributed to this report.