With PM’s support, MKs advance bill on death penalty for terrorists who kill Israelis

The Knesset National Security Committee advanced a bill Monday to introduce the death penalty for terrorists, after government hostage pointman Gal Hirsch told the panel that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu supports the measure.

The bill could have its first reading in the Knesset plenum as soon as Wednesday, Hebrew media reported.

The controversial legislation stipulates that courts will be able to impose the death penalty on those who have committed a nationalistically motivated murder of a citizen of Israel. It would not apply to an Israeli who killed a Palestinian.

Hirsch, who had initially voiced opposition to the bill during a National Security Committee meeting in September, reversed course on Monday, saying that both he and Netanyahu were in favor of the bill.

“The prime minister’s position, and I spoke with him before the debate, is for the bill,” Hirsch told the panel.

He said he was revoking his own opposition to the bill — which was due to fear of Hamas harming the living hostages it was holding — since the reason for it was no longer relevant.

Hirsch had told the committee in September that the position of the security professionals working to bring the hostages back was that the discussions on the proposed legislation should be suspended.

But, he said on Monday, “we are in a different situation today,” given that the final 20 living hostages have now been returned to Israel. “Therefore, the resistance I expressed in the previous debate has become redundant.”

However, Hirsch said, the legislation should only be passed on the condition that Israel’s security establishment, as well as the government’s Coordinator for the Hostages and Missing — Hirsch’s position — have the right to issue a confidential opinion on each individual case before the death penalty is handed down.

The bill was introduced by Otzma Yehudit lawmaker Limor Son Har-Melech, and has been championed by her party’s leader, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir.

Ben Gvir warned on October 20, two weeks ago, that if the bill did not move forward to pass its first reading in the Knesset plenum within three weeks, his far-right party would no longer consider itself obligated to vote with the coalition.

He welcomed Netanyahu’s support for the bill on Monday, but argued that neither the courts nor the security establishment should have discretion in the matter of sentencing terrorists to death.

“I thank the prime minister for his support for Otzma Yehudit’s bill for the death penalty for terrorists, but the court must not have any discretion – every terrorist who goes out to murder must know that the death penalty will be imposed on him,” the ultranationalist minister wrote on X. “It’s time for justice!”

Ben Gvir has previously claimed that the legislation will “bring deterrence” by proving to Hamas that “there is a price tag for what they did” on October 7, 2023, when it led thousands of terrorists into Israel, killing some 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and seizing 251 hostages.

He had, however, been trying to pass a death penalty for terrorists into law for some time prior to October 7.

In March 2023, lawmakers voted 55-9 in support of the bill, but it ultimately did not advance further despite having been part of the ruling Likud party’s coalition agreement with Otzma Yehudit, due to high-level opposition within the government and security services.

Son Har-Melech said on Monday that the legislation was also personal for her.

In 2003, the lawmaker’s husband, Shuli Har-Melech, was killed in a terror attack in the West Bank and she was severely wounded. One of her husband’s attackers, Khaled Najjar, was handed seven life sentences but was later released from prison in the 2011 Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange and was sent to Gaza, where he continued overseeing operations in Hamas’s West Bank division.

Najjar was killed in Rafah, in southern Gaza, in 2024.

He was killed, Son Har-Melech said, “when it was already too late.”

“A dead terrorist does not strike again,” she said. “He does not leave prison, he is not released in deals, and does not become a danger to our people again.”

The sole member of the National Security Committee to oppose advancing the legislation was MK Gilad Kariv, a member of the left-wing Labor Party.

The death penalty, he argued, “is a populist and extremist law that will not lead to the eradication of murderous terrorism but rather to its intensification.”

He accused Netanyahu of supporting the bill to “flatter” Ben Gvir due to the latter’s displeasure over the hostage release and ceasefire deal in Gaza, and warned that it was proof that “political considerations outweigh security considerations.”