The politics of death in “Israel’s” prisons
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
by Sayid Marcos Tenorio soupalestina
The approval by the Knesset of a law instituting the death penalty for Palestinian prisoners marks a historic rupture in Israeli penal policy—and a dangerous escalation in the institutionalization of state violence.
For the first time in decades, the Zionist state has formalized execution as a regular instrument of punishment, establishing death, including by hanging, as a standard sentence for Palestinians accused of attacks classified as “terrorism.”
The law, approved by 62 votes to 48, stipulates that executions must be carried out within 90 days of conviction, with severe restrictions on the right to defense, no requirement for judicial unanimity, and virtually no possibility of appeal or clemency.
In practice, this is a legal mechanism designed to target Palestinians exclusively. These cases are tried in military courts, while Jewish settlers—even those involved in acts of violence—and Israeli citizens remain under civil jurisdiction, where such punishment is rarely, if ever, applied.
The racial selectivity of the measure has been widely recognized by experts and international bodies. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has already classified it as a violation of international law and warned of its discriminatory character.
But this law did not emerge in a vacuum. It is the culmination of a broader process of hardening Israeli prison policies, particularly under the direct influence of Internal Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir.
Ben Gvir, a fascist politician and a central figure of Israel’s far right, has built his political trajectory by openly advocating extreme punitive measures against Palestinians. In recent years, he has pushed the government toward increasingly harsh policies, including severe restrictions on prison conditions and even the direct execution of detainees.
His role goes beyond rhetoric. He was one of the main architects of the death penalty law and used his political leverage to pressure Prime Minister and war crimes suspect Benjamin Netanyahu into advancing it.
This dynamic reveals a pattern of political coercion within the Israeli government itself. Dependent on a fragile coalition and under pressure from internal crises and legal accusations, Netanyahu has repeatedly yielded to far-right demands. The result is a continuous escalation of repression, in which Palestinian prisoners have become direct targets.
Today, around 10,000 Palestinians are held in Israeli prisons, including women and hundreds of children.
Reports by human rights organizations indicate a dramatic deterioration in detention conditions, including documented cases of torture, medical neglect, prolonged solitary confinement, and severe restrictions on family visits. Since October 2023, dozens of prisoners have died in Israeli custody, many as a result of abuse or medical neglect.
READ: Israeli law to execute Palestinian prisoners reflects far-right dominance: Israeli daily
In this context, the introduction of the death penalty does not merely represent a new punitive measure—it fundamentally redefines the role of the prison system. Prison ceases to function as a mechanism of containment and becomes a potential space of elimination.
This marks a qualitative shift—from repression to a politics of death.
The Israeli government attempts to justify this escalation in the name of security. However, the evidence tells a different story. Decades of mass incarceration, blockades, and military offensives have failed to eliminate Palestinian resistance.
On the contrary, the persistence of struggle—both inside and outside prisons—reveals the limits of a model based solely on force.
Rather than neutralizing resistance, prisons have become spaces of political organization and consciousness-building. Hunger strikes, internal mobilizations, and the central role of prisoners in political negotiations demonstrate that incarceration has failed to fulfill its intended function.
Faced with this failure, the death penalty emerges as an attempt to reconfigure the repressive system. When imprisonment is no longer sufficient, death becomes the next option.
But this logic carries a fundamental contradiction.
History shows that regimes which rely on extreme violence as a central instrument of governance tend to accelerate their own decline. Repression may impose temporary silence, but it does not eliminate the structural causes of conflict. On the contrary, it often intensifies them.
In the Palestinian case, this reality is unavoidable. Resistance is not a circumstantial phenomenon, but a historical response to a system of occupation and denial of rights. As long as these conditions persist, no policy of punishment—no matter how brutal—will be capable of producing stability.
The death penalty law, therefore, is not a sign of strength.
It is a symptom of crisis—the unfolding collapse of the Zionist regime, already visible across multiple dimensions.
By transforming the prison system into a space of execution, the Zionist “state” not only violates international law. It exposes, unmistakably, the limits of a model that can no longer sustain its own legitimacy.
The politics of death does not resolve the conflict.
It only reveals that the system producing it has run out of alternatives for survival.
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This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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