In the context of ongoing military operations, thousands of terrorists have been transferred to Israel. Some of them have already been identified as direct participants in the October 7 massacre. Others certainly will be. The country now faces difficult judicial choices, none of which is satisfactory.

Israel inherited the British judicial system in 1948, including the death penalty. Since 1954, Israel has appeared on the list of abolitionist countries according to Amnesty International. However, Jerusalem has never ratified or signed the Second Protocol aiming at the abolition of the death penalty. In fact, it formally remains in force under Israeli military law applicable for:

Crimes against humanity and war crimes

Nazi crimes against the Jewish people

At the same time, Israel abolished the death penalty for murder, replacing it with mandatory life imprisonment without parole.

It was the 1950 law on the punishment of Nazi criminals that was applied in 1961 during the sentencing of Adolf Eichmann. Before that, one must recall the tragic episode of the 1948 execution of Meir Tobiansky, wrongly accused of espionage and treason, summarily convicted by a military tribunal. He was later posthumously rehabilitated. A third death sentence was pronounced in the case of John Demjanjuk, accused of being Ivan the Terrible, a guard at Treblinka. He was acquitted in 1993 by the Supreme Court on the basis of “reasonable doubt” regarding his identity.

For the past fifty years, right-wing politicians have regularly included the death penalty in their electoral platforms, but without ever truly moving forward.

At the beginning of 2023, the current government introduced the death penalty into its judicial reform proposal presented to the Knesset. It would establish a “mandatory death penalty” for “those who intentionally or through indifference cause the death of an Israeli citizen” “when the act is committed with a racist or hateful motive… and with the intention of harming the State of Israel and its........

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