Israel approves preliminary execution bill for terrorists

The Knesset (parliament) of Israel in a preliminary reading approved a bill introducing the death penalty for terrorists. About it informed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“We have approved in the Knesset a law on the death penalty for terrorists,” the prime minister’s Telegram channel says.

The Jerusalem Post newspaper informedthat the project was approved by 55 votes “for”, 9 people voted “against”. The majority of the opposition, led by MP Yair Lapid, the first chairman and founder of Yesh Atid, did not vote in protest.

According to the draft document, the death penalty will be imposed on those who “intentionally or out of indifference inflict the death of an Israeli citizen when the act is done out of racist motives or hatred.” The bill will be submitted for discussion to the government cabinet on security issues, after which it must return to parliament for consideration in the first reading.

The Arab faction of the Israeli parliament, Hadash, said that the preliminary adoption of the law means “Israel’s slide into total fascism,” the Israeli newspaper reports. The legal center for the rights of Arab minorities in Israel “Adalah” also condemned the proposed bill. The center believes that such a law is “a clear violation of human rights and directed exclusively against the Palestinians.”

The death penalty was applied in Israel twice – during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war against Israeli army officer Meir Tobiansky, who was accused of espionage, but later posthumously acquitted, and in 1962 against Adolf Eichmann, Obersturmbannführer SS.