Hundreds of protesters took to the streets across the occupied Palestinian territories on Tuesday after Israel's parliament passed a law making death penalty by hanging the default punishment for Palestinian prisoners charged with killing Israelis. The law doesn't prescribe similar punishment to Israeli settlers convicted of killing Palestinians.
Palestinians, young and old, held sit-ins and marches in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, the territory where the new law is most sweeping.
West Bank military courts, which try only Palestinians has been accused of bias towards the Israeli military, which conducts frequent raids and detains Palestinians from the occupied territories.
The bill, which makes death penalty the default punishment for Palestinians charged with killing or plotting an attack against Israelis, passed its final vote in the Israeli parliament late Monday, to cheers and applause.
Israel’s far right minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who spearheaded the push for the legislation, described the law as long overdue and a sign of strength and national pride.
The law is set to take effect in 30 days but its implementation could be delayed by pending court proceedings at Israel’s highest tribunal.
The law extends also to Israeli courts, giving them the option of imposing the death penalty on Israeli citizens convicted of nationalistic murder — language that legal experts say effectively confines those who can be sentenced to death to Palestinian citizens of Israel and excludes Jewish citizens.
“Time is running out and silence is deadly,” read the signs carried by protesters in the central West Bank city of Nablus, which showed an animation of a prisoner wearing the Palestinian keffiyeh scarf next to a noose.
“Stop the law to execute prisoners, before it’s too late.”
The measure is not retroactive and won’t apply to current prisoners. Still, it signalled an extreme hardening of Israeli penal policy that elicited fear from the protesters for all Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails — emblems of national resistance.
“You are the symbol of struggle, You are the symbol of steadfastness,” the protesters in Nablus chanted, some holding up signs with the faces of friends and family currently in Israeli prisons.
The Fatah political party announced a general strike in the northern part of the West Bank for Wednesday. Palestinian officials released statements saying the death penalty measure violated international law and asking other countries to intervene. The Palestinian Foreign Ministry called for sanctions on Israel's parliament and its suspension from international bodies.
“The law represents a critical turning point in the formalization of extrajudicial killings under a legal guise,” the statement said. “The Ministry stresses that this law, in its essence, constitutes an institutionalized policy of field executions based on discriminatory and racist standards.”
Amnesty International has said that the use of the death penalty under the new measure could violate the right to life and the prohibition of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, as enshrined in international law.
In Gaza, dozens joined a demonstration in front of the headquarters of the Red Cross where women in hijab held up large framed photographs of well-known Palestinian prisoners like Marwan Barghouti.
(With inputs from Associated Press)