The United Nations on Tuesday harshly criticised the Israeli parliament’s approval of a “cruel and discriminatory” new death penalty bill, warning that applying it in occupied Palestinian territory “would constitute a war crime”.
Under the new law, passed in parliament late Monday, Palestinians in the occupied West Bank convicted by military courts of carrying out deadly attacks classified as “terrorism” will face the death penalty as a default sentence.
A spokesman for UN chief Antonio Guterres said the world body stood “against the death penalty in all its aspects, wherever”.
“The discriminatory nature of this particular law makes it particularly cruel and discriminatory, and we ask that the Israeli government rescind it and not implement it,” Stephane Dujarric told reporters in New York.
UN rights chief Volker Turk also called for the bill to be “promptly repealed”, warning that it was “patently inconsistent with Israel’s international law obligations”.
Because Palestinians in the territory are automatically tried in Israeli military courts, the measure effectively creates a separate and harsher legal track.
In Israeli civilian courts, the law allows for either death or life imprisonment for those convicted of killing with intent to harm the state.
Israel has only applied the death penalty twice: in 1948, shortly after the state’s founding, against a military captain accused of high treason, and then in 1962, when the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann was hanged.
Turk stressed that “the death penalty is profoundly difficult to reconcile with human dignity”, cautioning that “its application in a discriminatory manner would constitute an additional, particularly egregious violation of international law”.
“Its application to residents of the occupied Palestinian territory would constitute a war crime.”
The UN rights chief also expressed alarm at another bill currently before the Knesset aimed at establishing a special military court exclusively to prosecute crimes committed during and in the aftermath of Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack inside Israel, which sparked the war in Gaza.
That court would not have jurisdiction over crimes committed by Israeli forces in the occupied Palestinian territory.
“I urge the Knesset to reject this bill,” Turk said, warning that “by focusing exclusively on crimes committed by Palestinians, it would institutionalise discriminatory and one-sided justice”.
His statement cautioned that “these legislative steps will further entrench Israel’s violation of the prohibition of racial segregation and apartheid by discriminatorily targeting Palestinians, who are often convicted following unfair trials”.
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