Far-right lawmakers wear noose pins, similar to hostage badges, to support death penalty for terrorists bill

By Charlie Summers

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8 December 2025, 11:28 am

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National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir attends a committee meeting on legislation mandating the death penalty for terrorists at the Knesset on December 8, 2025. He wears a pin shaped like a noose in his lapel.(Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

Lawmakers in the far-right Otzma Yehudit party wear golden lapel pins in the shape of a noose during a committee meeting on a controversial bill to legislate the death penalty for terrorists.

The pins are reminiscent of the yellow ribbon badges worn to raise awareness of the hostages taken by Hamas on October 7, 2023.

A statement from National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir’s office says the noose pins are meant to symbolize the lawmakers’ “commitment to the demand for the death penalty for terrorists” and send “a clear message that terrorists are deserving of death.”

The politicians are attending a meeting of the National Security Committee to deliberate on the legislation after it passed its first reading last month. Since then, the bill has undergone several changes and, in its current form, poses several constitutional difficulties, according to the committee’s legal adviser.

In the hearing on the bill, which has encountered firm opposition from Israeli rights groups across the board, Ben Gvir says that the noose is just “one of the options through which we will implement the death penalty law for terrorists.”

“Of course, there is the option of the gallows, the electric chair and also the option of euthanasia,” he says. He insists that despite the Israeli Medical Association’s stance against the bill, he has received “100 calls from doctors who said: ‘Itamar, just tell us when.'”

He once again declares that he is proud of the increasingly dire conditions for Palestinian security prisoners on his watch, in light of surging deaths among the population.

“This morning, I saw that it was published that under Itamar Ben Gvir, 110 terrorists have died. They said there has never been anything like this since the state’s founding,” he says.

He denies that the Prison Service had a hand in the deaths, claiming they “arrived sick or died from various injuries,” but says that he does not intend to apologize for ending the so-called “summer camp” that purportedly existed in Israeli detention facilities before his term.