The ink was barely dry on the Knesset’s vote when the communiqués began to flood through the letterbox. Eight Islamic nations – the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Qatar and Pakistan – issued a joint condemnation of Israel’s new death penalty law for Arab terrorist offences, decrying it as racist and a threat to regional stability. Australia, Germany, France, Italy, New Zealand and the United Kingdom followed with their own joint statement. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights weighed in; the EU threatened trade sanctions; Human Rights Watch, along with Amnesty International, called it apartheid.

All are extraordinary, except for one small detail that we must not forget.

Saudi Arabia, which co-signed that joint Muslim statement, executed at least 330 people in 2024 alone – for offences including drug possession, adultery and, most horrifically, alleged sorcery. Iran, which needs no joint statement to express its contempt for Israel (simply download the Home Front Command app to check on your friends and family in Israel for your witness), executed over 1,500 people in 2025, nearly half of them for drug-related crimes, many following confessions extracted under torture, some for offences committed when they were children. Then, in January, Iranian security forces operating for the regime opened fire on their own people in the streets of Tehran, Karaj, and Kermanshah, killing 36,000 people in two nights.

The fog of a government-imposed internet blackout makes precision impossible here, but this may be the largest massacre of civilians in the 21st century. The order came directly from Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who instructed his security services to crush the protests against his regime ‘by any means necessary’.

What do you think the UN Security Council’s response to the........

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