Several Arab lawmakers and former Balad MK Sami Abu Shehadeh asked the High Court of Justice to join an existing petition against Israel’s new death penalty law for terrorism cases, drawing a sharp response from National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who championed the legislation.
The request, filed by Adalah, asks the court to add Hadash MK Ofer Cassif, Ra’am MKs Mansour Abbas, Walid al-Hawashla, and Waleed Taha, and former Balad MK Sami Abu Shehadeh as petitioners in the case.
The original petition was filed by Adalah, several human rights organizations, and MKs Aida Touma-Sliman (Hadash), Ahmad Tibi (Ta’al), and Ayman Odeh (Hadash).
According to the request, the applicants asked to join after the petition was filed, citing their public interest in the law and involvement in the parliamentary and public debate around it. Their addition, they argued, would help present the full range of issues before the court.
Responding to the request, Ben-Gvir said it showed who was afraid of the death penalty law, and why.
“If anyone had any doubt who is afraid of the death penalty law for terrorists and why, today they got the answer,” Ben-Gvir said. “Supporters of terrorism are rushing to stand against the law that will execute their terrorist friends. When they are afraid, it means we are doing something right.”
“We will continue to fight terrorism without compromise and restore deterrence to the State of Israel,” he added.
Petition labels death penalty law as unconstitutional, discriminatory
The petition itself asks the High Court to strike down the law as unconstitutional, arguing that it violates the rights to life, dignity, equality, and due process, and creates a discriminatory framework aimed primarily at Palestinians, especially through its application in West Bank military courts.
The law, passed by the Knesset in March, created two tracks for capital punishment: one in Israeli criminal law, and one in military law in the West Bank. Critics have focused especially on the West Bank provisions, under which death would become the default punishment in certain terrorism murder cases, subject only to a narrow exception.
The renewed debate over the law also comes as legal figures criticized it at the Israel Bar Association conference in Eilat on Wednesday.
Prof. Yoav Sapir, a former national public defender and a Tel Aviv University law professor, said during a panel on the death penalty for terrorists that the question was not whether terrorists “deserve to live,” but whether Israel should be the one to execute them.
“Opposition to the death penalty stems first and foremost from the question of what it says about us as a society and as a state,” Sapir said.
Sapir argued that the law could not be separated from Ben-Gvir and what he called “Ben-Gvirist politics,” noting that the law does not apply retroactively and therefore does not apply to the October 7 massacre.
Death penalty law 'a moral stain' for Israel
“It is impossible to disconnect the law from the masks of hostages turned into hanging ropes, from hanging-rope cakes” and from Ben-Gvir’s “grotesque performance,” he said. “Unfortunately, the government and coalition surrendered here to ‘Ben-Gvirist’ politics.”
Sapir called the law “a moral stain,” saying it reflected “an urge for revenge, nationalism, and racism” more than a security or legal consideration.
Attorney Eli Bachar, a former legal adviser to the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency), also criticized the logic behind the law during the panel.
“If the death penalty is determined according to what the criminal deserves, one must ask why no one suggested imposing it on the murderer of the prime minister,” Bachar said, referring to the assassination of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin.
Justice Yechiel Kasher previously ordered the state to file a preliminary response to the earlier petitions, but declined at that stage to issue a temporary order freezing the law.
The Adalah petition is one of several challenges now pending before the High Court.
ACRI petitioned against the law shortly after its passage, and a separate petition was later filed by Democrats MK Gilad Kariv, the Zulat Institute, and Rabbis for Human Rights, focusing in part on the immediate risk that the West Bank military-order amendments could take effect before the court rules on the broader constitutional challenge.