Palestinian Human Rights Organisations Urge UN Intervention to Halt Israel’s Death Penalty Bill Targeting Palestinian Detainees

Date: 26 November 2025

In a joint urgent appeal to UN Special Procedures and the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, Al-Haq – Law in the Service of Man, Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, Al Mezan Center for Human Rights (Al Mezan), and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) warn that Israel’s draft Penal Bill (Amendment No. 159) (Death Penalty for Terrorists) 2025 would formalise the systematic, state-sanctioned killing of Palestinian detainees and further entrench Israel’s settler-colonial apartheid regime while advancing its genocidal violence against the Palestinian people.

On 10 November 2025, the Knesset plenum approved the draft bill in its first reading by 39 votes to 16. The bill now returns to the National Security Committee for deliberations and must still pass two further readings to become law. Minister of National Security and leader of Otzma Yehudit, the ultranationalist political party that sponsored the bill, has stated “the process of completing the legislation will continue with even greater intensity and speed”. The international community cannot remain passive and must act decisively to halt Israel’s escalating legislative, physical and rhetorical attacks aimed at erasing the Palestinian people.

A Mandatory Death Penalty Targeting Palestinians

Under the draft bill, any person who causes the death of an Israeli citizen “deliberately or through indifference,” from a motive of racism or hostility against an Israeli citizen and with the aim of harming the State of Israel and “the national revival of the Jewish people in its land,” will be sentenced to death. In violation of international law, the death sentence would be mandatory and non-commutable.

If transposed into a military order, the bill would also allow military courts in the unlawfully occupied West Bank to impose the death penalty by simple majority, rather than a unanimous decision as is currently required, while explicitly barring consideration of extenuating circumstances. Palestinians tried in Israeli military courts are systematically denied due process and fair trial guarantees, including through prolonged detention, charges based on “secret evidence”, severely restricted access to counsel, and proceedings conducted in a language many do not understand. In addition to violating the fundamental right to due process and a fair trial enshrined in Article 14 of the ICCPR and related principles of legality, necessity, proportionality, and non-discrimination, the bill represents a real and blatant risk to the right to life protected under Article 6 of the ICCPR and Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Combined with vague, overly broad and discriminatory “counter-terrorism” legislation, a mandatory, non-commutable death sentence decided by a simple majority would amount to arbitrary deprivation of life in violation of Article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Furthermore, Israel’s routine reliance on coerced “confessions” obtained through torture, legally invalidates the basis of the conviction and subsequent sentence.

Mass Detention and Israel’s Genocide against the Palestinian People

The urgent appeal situates the bill within a broader context of Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people. Currently, an estimated 10,800 Palestinians are being held across 23 prisons, detention facilities and interrogation centres, more than double the number held before 7 October 2023. As of 30 September 2025, at least 350 Palestinian children are detained in Israeli prisons. Half of these, 168 children, are held in administrative detention without charge or trial. By 31 August 2025, 75 Palestinians died in Israeli detention since 7 October 2023.

At the same time, Israeli officials routinely depict Palestinians – including civilians, children, journalists and human rights defenders – as “terrorists” or legitimate targets, erasing the distinction between combatants and civilians and casting an entire people as collectively responsible. The organisations warned that presenting the bill as a “counter-terrorism” measure reveals its true purpose: to provide a legal façade for collective punishment, in breach of Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and customary international law, and routinely impose death sentences against Palestinian detainees as part of Israel’s broader campaign to destroy the Palestinian people. The mass killing of Palestinian detainees and terror, helplessness and lasting trauma imposed on families and communities facing mandatory, non-commutable death sentences must be understood as part of this pattern of genocidal acts.

The organisations called on UN Special Procedures and the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention to:

1. Label the bill as an unacceptable attack on the Palestinian people that, if implemented into law, constitutes acts of genocide, apartheid, collective punishment, torture and some of the most serious human rights violations;
2. Call upon Third States to demand the Israeli government refrain from passing the bill on the basis of its infringement of international law and the rights of Palestinians throughout the OPT and on both sides of the Green Line;
3. Situate Israel’s latest legislative efforts within the root causes underpinning the ongoing Israeli military aggression and genocide against the Palestinian people, in particular Israel’s settler-colonial apartheid system and ongoing Nakba;
4. Demand that Israel immediately cease its unlawful military activity and genocide in the Occupied Palestinian Territory;
5. Remind States of their binding obligations to prevent and punish the crime of genocide and to respect and ensure respect for the Geneva Conventions of 1949 – pursuant to these obligations, States must take all reasonable measures to prevent further breaches of these provisions by Israel including: imposing a full arms embargo; cutting diplomatic and trade relations; imposing comprehensive sanctions; and pursuing accountability;
6. Remind States of their binding obligation to refrain from assisting in maintaining the illegal situation arising from Israel’s violations of peremptory norms and promote the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people, in line with the International Court of Justice’s Advisory Opinion on Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem;
7. Call on the UN Security Council to implement economic sanctions and other countermeasures capable of forcing Israel to adhere to its binding obligations under international law and ending its mass atrocities against the Palestinian people;
8. Demand the reconstitution of the UN Centre and Special Committee against Apartheid;
9. Ask the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to expedite the investigation into the Situation in Palestine with full resources and onsite visits as promised in December 2022.

Please find the full submission here