Ramallah / PNN /

 The Palestinian Prisoners’ Society issued a statement regarding the ongoing and accelerating efforts of the Israeli occupation to enact a death‑penalty law against prisoners, following its first reading approval by the “National Security Committee” in the Knesset.
The Society affirmed that the occupation has never ceased carrying out executions outside the “framework of law” against Palestinians—whether deliberate killings during arrest, or interrogation, or assassination, or lethal medical neglect, as part of a systematic medical‑crime track—and that what is happening today is merely an additional step to institutionalize a crime that has existed and been practiced for decades, through “legalising” it via laws, legislation and military orders.
They continued: “For many decades the Israeli colonial system has carried out slow‑execution policies against hundreds of prisoners inside the jails, through systematic tools and methods that resulted in the martyrdom of dozens. These policies have seen an unprecedented escalation since the start of the genocide war, making the current phase the most bloody in the history of the Palestinian prisoner movement, where the number of martyr prisoners in the occupation’s jails since the beginning of the war until early November 2025 is (81) martyrs—these only the publicly announced, alongside dozens of Gaza detainees who were executed and remain subject to enforced disappearance.”
They added: “One of the most prominent evidences of the ongoing executions is the bodies of martyrs who were handed over from Gaza after the war, for it turned out that a large portion of them had been detainees who were executed subsequently, and some appeared in filmed footage alive—before it later became clear they had been executed and their bodies desecrated.”
The Society said that the fact that the legislative track of the “Prisoners’ Execution Law” reached the stage of its first reading was not surprising to those following the detainee issue, especially in light of the unprecedented ferocity practised by the occupation system, which intensifies in its mass‑annihilation conduct, while prisons constitute one of the arenas of this extended extermination from Gaza to the various places of detention.
They added: “Although the position of international law is clear, which has worked to abolish the death penalty through several international treaties, one of them globally‑scoped, the occupation’s insistence on codifying this crime and giving it a ‘legitimate’ façade confirms again that the ‘State of the occupation’ acts as though above the law and beyond accountability — as revealed by the genocide war that exposed the international community’s inability and its systemic complicity with the colonial‑murder system.”
They went on: “The brutality of the occupation has reached an unprecedented level—so much so that rights‑based concepts have become inadequate for describing it; for the ‘State of the occupation’ did not stop at killing dozens of prisoners and detainees since the outbreak of the genocide war, but is now seeking to entrench the crime of execution through a special law.”
It is worth noting that the draft “Prisoners’ Execution Law” is not new; it already exists within the occupation’s legal systems, some of which were inherited from the British Mandate systems. However, its implementation remained limited, and it has undergone several phases and amendments based on previous cases in which calls were made to enact the death penalty against Palestinian fighters. It has always been tied to political orientations within the occupation state. With the rise of Israel’s most extreme‑right government in its history, the calls increased—led by the fascist minister Itamar Ben‑Gvir, members of the Likud party, and Yisrael Beiteinu, and a diverse spectrum of right‑wing Knesset members—to approve the law, even linking the fate of the so‑called governing coalition to its passage, which received direct support from the fascist Benjamin Netanyahu.