MKs advance death penalty for terrorists bill for final Knesset plenum votes

The Knesset National Security Committee voted late Tuesday to advance the coalition’s controversial bill to mandate the death penalty for terror convicts to the parliament’s plenum for the final two readings needed for it to pass into law.

The vote was held after a marathon session attended by National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, whose Otzma Yehudit party colleague MK Limor Son Har-Melech sponsored the legislation.

“The law sets out a clear and unequivocal message: Those who choose to murder Jews because they are Jews lose their right to live,” said Har-Melech, calling the bill’s advancement “a moral and necessary step.”

“This is a historic moment of justice for the State of Israel. Those who choose to murder Jews just because they are Jews have one sentence — death,” said Ben Gvir. “No more revolving door of attacks, imprisonments and releases. This law restores deterrence, restores justice, and sends a clear and unambiguous message to our enemies: Jewish blood is not cheap. We will continue to lead an uncompromising policy against terror until victory.”

According to a statement by Otzma Yehudit, the bill is set to advance to its second and third readings in the Knesset next week.

Committee chairman Zvika Fogel urged “all members of the coalition” to vote in favor of the bill in its final two readings.

MK Rabbi Gilad Kariv of the left-wing Democrats party, who serves on the National Security Committee and opposes the bill, said in a statement that, “it is an extreme bill that does not exist in any democratic country, with serious moral flaws and profound security recklessness.”

He accused Ben Gvir of advancing the legislation to mask a lack of achievements and the coalition of backing it ahead of elections rather than out of sound security considerations.

Haaretz reported that the committee was hoping to send the bill to the plenum as early as Monday, before the Knesset goes on recess for the Passover holiday.

The bill passed its first reading in November and has since been under discussion by the committee in preparation for its subsequent readings in the plenum.

Son Har-Melech’s original bill stipulated that Israeli courts must impose the death penalty on those who have committed a nationalistically motivated murder of a citizen of Israel, while allowing judges serving on military courts in the West Bank to sentence offenders to death with a simple majority, rather than a unanimous decision.

However, the bill has been subjected to numerous objections and proposed amendments from opposition lawmakers and the committee’s legal adviser, who have argued that the bill is unconstitutional and discriminatory. More than 2,000 reservations were filed against the legislation, mostly by opposition lawmakers.

Significant changes were made last week to “soften” the bill following pressure from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office, and with the support of the National Security Council, Shin Bet security agency and Foreign Ministry, which all argued that the draft was harsher than US capital punishment standards and could expose Israel to diplomatic and legal scrutiny abroad.

The revisions removed a clause mandating the death penalty without judicial discretion, meaning the bill now gives judges the option to choose between capital punishment and life imprisonment. Another change removed the requirement that trials take place in military courts, allowing them to be held in civil courts.

Finally, in a bid to avoid accusations of discrimination, lawmakers dropped language defining terror victims as “Israeli citizens,” which would have applied the death penalty differently based on the victims’ citizenship status and excluded Palestinian victims of Jewish terrorism.

While the death penalty formally exists in Israeli law, it has only ever been used once, in 1962 — in the case of senior Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust.

It is technically allowed in cases of high treason, as well as in certain circumstances under martial law that applies within the IDF and in the West Bank, but currently requires a unanimous decision from a panel of three judges, and has never been implemented.