The United Nations condemns Israel’s new death penalty law for Palestinians as discriminatory and a potential war crime, urging its immediate repeal.
GENEVA: The United Nations has issued a stark condemnation of a new Israeli law that mandates the death penalty for Palestinians convicted of deadly attacks.
UN officials warned that applying the law in occupied Palestinian territory would constitute a war crime.
The legislation, passed by Israel’s parliament late Monday, makes capital punishment the default sentence for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank convicted by military courts of terrorism resulting in death.
A separate, less severe legal track exists for Israeli civilians.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’s spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, stated the organisation stands “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,” Dujarric told reporters.
UN human rights chief Volker Turk called for the bill to be “promptly repealed”, declaring it “patently inconsistent with Israel’s international law obligations”.
He stressed that “the death penalty is profoundly difficult to reconcile with human dignity”.
“Its application in a discriminatory manner would constitute an additional, particularly egregious violation of international law,” Turk cautioned.
He explicitly stated that “its application to residents of the occupied Palestinian territory would constitute a war crime”.
Israel has carried out the death penalty only twice in its history, most notably against Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in 1962.
Turk also expressed alarm over a separate bill to create a special military court solely for crimes committed during and after Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack.
That proposed court would not have jurisdiction over alleged crimes committed by Israeli forces.
“I urge the Knesset to reject this bill,” Turk said, warning it “would institutionalise discriminatory and one-sided justice”.