The Knesset National Security Committee on Sunday approved for first reading a bill that would impose the death penalty on terrorists.
Committee members voted to advance the law, which was introduced by Otzma Yehudit Party Knesset member Limor Son Har-Melech, despite warnings by Israel Defense Forces Gen. (res.) Gal Hirsch, coordinator for the captives and missing, that the move could endanger the hostages held by Hamas.
“I asked that this discussion not be held; I asked the prime minister not to bring the matter before the plenum before a discussion in the Cabinet, where I would present my assessment,” Hirsch told lawmakers.
Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who leads the Otzma Yehudit Party, confirmed during the debate that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office had asked him to postpone the vote.
However, he continued, “Before passing the budget, the prime minister pledged his government would support the death penalty for terrorists.” Hamas should know that “if even a single hair on a hostage’s head is harmed … precisely at this time the death penalty is needed.”
According to the bill advanced by the committee on Sunday, “a terrorist who is convicted of murder out of motives of racism or hostility toward the public, and under circumstances in which the act was carried out with the intention of harming the State of Israel and the rebirth of the Jewish people in its land, shall be sentenced to death.”
The proposed legislation states that convicted terrorists would face a mandatory death sentence, with no room for judicial discretion.
Otzma Yehudit Party MK Tzvika Foghel, who chairs the National Security Committee, told JNS on Monday that he initiated the discussion on the bill “because this law will increase the pressure on Hamas to reach a deal on our terms.
“It will want to release its people from prison before the law is approved on third reading,” Foghel said of the possibility that Jerusalem would free convicted terrorists as part of the emerging hostage deal with Hamas.
The National Security Committee legal adviser, Iddo Ben-Yitzhak, claimed that the vote, which passed by 4-1, was illegal given the fact that it was held during the Knesset’s summer recess.
Ben-Yitzhak also claimed that the committee’s discussion preceding the vote lacked input from representatives of the defense establishment, as well as a substantive debate on the provisions of the draft legislation.
Though Israel does allow for the death penalty for murder committed by the Nazis and their helpers, as well as for treason, it has only been used twice.
IDF officer Meir Tobianski was executed in 1948 on treason charges. He was later exonerated. SS officer and Nazi Party official Adolf Eichmann was executed in Jerusalem in 1962 for his role in the Holocaust.
Some 6,000 terrorists from Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Fatah, as well as unaffiliated Gazan “civilians,” infiltrated the Jewish state’s southern border on Oct. 7, 2023, murdering some 1,200 people, wounding thousands and kidnapping 251.
Forty-eight hostages remain in captivity in the Strip, 722 days after the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, cross-border terror attacks in the Jewish state’s south. Of these, 20 are believed to be alive.
