PHROC Condemns the Establishment of a Special Military Tribunal to Impose the Death Penalty against Palestinians, as a Measure of Unconstrained Illegality by Al-Haq

Encouraged by the failure of the international community to take concrete measures in response to its manifestly illegal and highly discriminatory death penalty law of 30 March 2026 – the Israeli Knesset has added to its body of apartheid legislation a second death penalty law. Passed on 11 May 2026 by a unanimous vote of 93-0 in a rare show of bipartisan support, the law (co-sponsored by Simcha Rothman of the Religious Zionism party and Yulia Malinovsky of opposition group Yisrael Beytenu, and strongly backed by Justice Minister Yariv Levin) establishes a special military tribunal to prosecute Palestinians allegedly involved in Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on 7 October 2023.

In its longstanding pursuit of Palestinian erasure through an apartheid legal framework and ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people, the Knesset has attempted to circumvent the prohibition on the retroactive application of capital punishment by transplanting existing Israeli criminal offences – including treason, assisting an enemy in wartime, and genocide under the 1950 Law for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide – into a bespoke tribunal system empowered to impose the death penalty, in proceedings with significantly diminished due process protections.