Palestinian protesters hold posters of Palestinian prisoners demanding a prisoner swap deal between Hamas and Israel in the West Bank city of Nablus. (Photo by Nasser Ishtayeh/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Israel has crossed a line it has long approached but never formally declared: legalising the killing of prisoners.
By passing a law permitting the execution of Palestinian detainees, what they once carried out in the shadows with impunity now stands codified in law. In a system where Palestinian conviction rates in military courts are consistently reported by human rights organisations and legal experts to exceed 95%, often reaching as high as 99%, the death penalty is not a measure of justice, but a guarantee of death.
To understand the gravity of this moment, one must first understand the scale and function of imprisonment in the Palestinian context. Detention has never been merely a legal measure; it has been a central instrument of control.
One in five Palestinians (20%) has been arrested or detained by Israeli authorities since the 1967 occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.
This system of mass incarceration falls most heavily on Palestinian men, with estimates indicating that nearly two in every five (40%) have been arrested and charged over the course of their lives. An entire generation marked by detention.
At the heart of this system lies administrative detention, a practice that allows individuals to be held without charge or trial, often on secret evidence, for renewable periods of six months. In reality, this means indefinite imprisonment without due process.
Under the current trajectory, and in the shadow of this new inhumane law, such detention risks being extended in prison time, and in consequence, transforming from prolonged incarceration into the possibility of state-sanctioned execution.
Since October 2023, conditions within Israeli prisons have deteriorated dramatically. The findings of Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, point to widespread and systematic abuses against Palestinian men and women in Israeli prisons: rape, torture, sexual violence, humiliation, solitary confinement without access to family and deliberate medical neglect.
These violations form part of a broader pattern made possible by sustained international inaction. Impunity is not incidental; it is enabling.
Therefore, the newly-approved law must not be understood as something abnormal, but as a continuation. For years, proposals to formalise the execution of Palestinian prisoners have circulated within the Israeli parliament, repeatedly amended, repeatedly delayed.
The intent has not changed; it is the timing that has. At a moment when global attention is diverted by expanding regional tensions and shifting geopolitical priorities through the US-Israeli war against Iran, this far- right government has seized the opportunity to advance a measure that would have once provoked immediate international outrage.
The silence is not accidental. It is being relied upon. Palestinians know too well that execution has never been confined to courtrooms. Field executions, extrajudicial killings carried out with impunity, have long been a feature of life under occupation.
What this law does is remove any remaining ambiguity. It provides legal cover for what has already been practised, the systematisation of murder within governance structures.
For those in South Africa and across the African continent, this moment should resonate deeply. The use of detention and imprisonment to suppress resistance is nothing new.
Under apartheid, political prisoners were jailed, and executions were carried out by the state between 1961 and 1989. Yet South Africa ultimately chose a different path, abolishing the death penalty in 1995 as part of its commitment to human dignity and constitutional justice.
Today, a new shift is occurring: the law is being repurposed to authorise the destruction of life rather than protect it.
Figures such as Marwan Barghouti and Ahmad Sa’adat, widely regarded as central voices in Palestinian political life, now face a risk that echoes beyond their individual cases.
Their standing, comparable in many respects to that of Nelson Mandela, Ahmed Kathrada and other South African freedom fighters during the struggle against apartheid, underscores what is truly at stake.
This is not only about prisoners. It is about leadership, resistance and the future of a people.
More than 9 000 Palestinian prisoners are currently held in Israeli detention. This law places them under a new and immediate threat. It converts imprisonment into a pipeline to execution, governed by a discriminatory and politicised system.
Such a measure could not have been adopted in a vacuum. It is the product of a broader failure of international institutions that have not held Israel accountable and of governments that have chosen silence over principle.
The credibility of the international legal system is now on trial as much as the lives of those it has failed to protect.
The response must therefore be clear and decisive. Parliaments across the world must urgently reconsider their relations with the Israeli parliament. This includes imposing sanctions on its members, suspending its participation in international parliamentary bodies and supporting efforts to isolate an institution that has moved to legitimise racism and killing under the guise of law.
The State of Palestine calls for the boycott of this legislative body as a necessary step to uphold the most basic principles of international law and human dignity.
History will not remember this moment for the arguments made in defence of such a law. It will remember who acted and who remained silent, as the legalisation of death took its place on the statute books.
Hanan Jarrar is the Ambassador of the State of Palestine to South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho and Malawi
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