Rights groups slam Israel's new law approving use of death penalty against Palestinians
The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs condemned the legislation as a “dangerous escalation”.
Human rights groups and Palestinian leaders have condemned Israel's new law, reports Aljazeera.
The legislation, passed yesterday (30 March) by Israel's Parliament, the Knesset, makes the death penalty by hanging the default punishment for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank who have been found guilty of killing Israelis.
According to Aljazeera, the Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs condemned the legislation as a "dangerous escalation".
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In a social media post, the ministry stressed that "Israel has no sovereignty over Palestinian land" in the occupied territory.
"This law once again reveals the nature of the Israeli colonial system, which seeks to legitimise extrajudicial killing under legislative cover," it said.
Hamas, a Palestinian group, slammed the passage of the death penalty law as a "dangerous precedent that threatens the lives" of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.
"This decision reaffirms the [Israeli] occupation and its leaders' contempt for international law and their disregard for all humanitarian norms and conventions," Hamas said in a statement.
Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, a Gaza-based rights organisation said it condemned the law "in the strongest terms".
"This law targets Palestinians and entrenches Israel's long-standing policy of extrajudicial execution under the guise of law, in clear violation of international human rights and humanitarian law," the PCHR said in a social media post.
The UN Human Rights Office in Palestine called on Israel to "immediately repeal the discriminatory death penalty law", noting that the measure violates the country's obligations under international law.
"The United Nations opposes the death penalty under all circumstances. The implementation of this new law would violate international law's prohibition of cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment," the office said on X.
Erika Guevara-Rosas, Amnesty International's senior director of research, advocacy, policy and campaigns, noted that the law's passage comes just weeks after Israel dropped all charges against soldiers accused of sexually assaulting a Palestinian detainee.
"For years, we have seen an alarming pattern of apparent extrajudicial executions and other unlawful killings of Palestinians – with the perpetrators also enjoying near-total impunity," Guevara-Rosas said in a statement.
Alain Berset, secretary-general of the Council of Europe, denounced the law's passage as a "serious regression".
"The death penalty is a legal anachronism incompatible with contemporary human-rights standards. Moreover, any application of the death penalty that could be characterised as discriminatory is unacceptable in a state governed by the rule of law," Berset said in a statement.
Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani, in a social media post just hours before the law was officially passed, said that Italy, Germany, France and the United Kingdom had requested that the Israeli government withdraw the bill.
"The commitments undertaken, especially with the resolutions voted on at the United Nations, for a moratorium on the death penalty cannot be disregarded," Tajani wrote on X.
"For us, life is an absolute value; arrogating to oneself the right to take it away in order to inflict a punishment is an inhuman measure that violates the dignity of the person."
