The Israeli Knesset voted overwhelmingly on Monday to approve a bill creating a special tribunal tasked with trying Palestinians accused of participating in the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack — and giving judges the power to impose the death penalty by a simple majority. The 93-0 vote, with 27 lawmakers absent or abstaining, reflected rare consensus in a deeply divided parliament, said Simcha Rothman, a sponsor of the bill and a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition.
“The overwhelming consensus for the bill in the Knesset shows Israeli lawmakers can come together around a common mission,” Rothman said.
The legislation establishes a panel of judges that can hand down a death sentence by majority vote, rather than requiring unanimity, and creates a separate special appeals court rather than routing appeals through the regular court system. The trials must be conducted in a livestreamed Jerusalem courtroom — a provision that has drawn immediate comparisons to the 1961-62 trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, which was broadcast live on television and culminated in the last execution carried out by Israel, by hanging, in 1962. Capital punishment technically remains on the books for genocide, espionage during wartime, and certain terror offenses, but it has not been applied since Eichmann.
Several Israeli rights groups, including Hamoked, Adalah, and the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, swiftly condemned the measure. In a joint statement they argued that while “justice for the victims of October 7 is a legitimate and urgent imperative,” any accountability for the crimes “must be pursued through a process which includes rather than abandons the principles of justice.”
Opponents warned that the majority-vote threshold makes the death penalty too easy to impose, that the special appeals court undercuts standard due-process protections, and that broadcasting the proceedings before guilt is determined risks turning the trials into a public spectacle. They also raised concerns about the reliability of evidence, noting that some of it may have been extracted through harsh interrogation methods.
The new tribunal is separate from a law passed in March that authorizes the death penalty for Palestinians convicted of murdering Israelis. That earlier measure was widely condemned by the international community and rights organizations as discriminatory and inhumane. It applies only to future cases and is not retroactive, meaning it cannot be used against the October 2023 suspects.
The war that followed the attack has killed more than 72,628 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, which does not differentiate between civilians and combatants but says roughly half the dead were women and children. The figures are considered generally reliable by United Nations agencies and independent experts. At least 846 of those deaths have occurred since a ceasefire took hold last October, the ministry said. Israeli forces also killed hundreds of militants in ground operations and took an unknown number of suspects into custody.
The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel reports that the country still holds about 1,300 Palestinians from Gaza without charge in its detention facilities. Since October 2023, at least 7,000 Palestinians from Gaza have been held in Israeli custody, and roughly 5,000 of them were later released. That number does not include those detained specifically on suspicion of participating in the October 7 attack or involvement in holding hostages.