London - The Palestinian Return Centre (PRC) strongly condemns the Israeli Knesset’s preliminary approval of a bill allowing the implementation of the death penalty against Palestinian prisoners, describing it as an unprecedented step towards transforming Israel’s military occupation into a fully institutionalised system of racial domination.

This legislation seeks to provide legal cover for Israel’s long-standing policy of extrajudicial executions against Palestinians, both during arrest and after detention, under complete impunity. Available data indicates that at least 54 Palestinian detainees have died in Israeli custody since October 2023 as a result of torture, ill-treatment, or medical neglect. Thousands more are held in harsh and inhumane conditions, including in underground detention facilities in the Negev desert, without judicial oversight or access to fair trial guarantees.

Human rights reports reveal that Palestinian detainees are subjected to systematic starvation, escalating physical and psychological torture, prolonged solitary confinement, and denial of family and legal visits, all in flagrant violation of the Convention against Torture and the Fourth Geneva Convention. Several cases of enforced disappearance have also been documented, particularly among detainees from the Gaza Strip, whose whereabouts remain unknown despite repeated international calls for disclosure.

PRC warns that the bill’s exclusive application to Palestinian prisoners exposes its inherently discriminatory and racist nature, reaffirming its place within Israel’s broader apartheid policies described by UN experts and international human rights organisations as a “comprehensive system of colonial domination and oppression”.

PRC stresses that legalising the death penalty for Palestinians marks a dangerous shift from unlawful killing to state-sanctioned execution, constituting a war crime under Article 8 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and a crime against humanity for targeting a specific national group.

PRC therefore calls upon the international community to:

PRC emphasises that passing this bill would make Israel the only state in the world to explicitly legislate capital punishment on a national or ethnic basis, reminiscent of apartheid-era South Africa, and demands urgent action by the International Criminal Court and the UN Human Rights Council.

PRC warns that continued international silence in the face of this legislative atrocity constitutes complicity in the entrenchment of a systematic policy of killing Palestinian prisoners, a crime that has persisted for more than seven decades.