Recent legislative dynamics in Israel have prompted grave concern among Palestinian rights defenders. The Israeli security committee has approved advancing a bill to the full legislature that would enable the execution of Palestinian prisoners, a development denounced as “organised state terrorism” by Maher Younis. He contends that the measure is not new in substance, but the codification of a policy of targeted killing under legal veneer, further intensifying the siege on Palestinian detainees.

Younis emphasises that for years prisoners have endured deprivation, isolation and medical neglect, conditions that amount to slow execution without formal sentencing. Now, the bill threatens to turn such systemic practices into formal legal punishment, offering a mechanism for collective crimes against a captive population. Where previously repression operated largely through ad hoc means, the proposed legislation transforms it into a structural component of the detention system.

By raising the spectre of executions, the bill marks a considerable shift. Younis warns that Israeli prisons, described as “mass graves”, could become instruments of expansive political retaliation against the prisoners’ movement, extending beyond isolated cases to a wholesale policy of eradication. He calls for urgent international action, citing obligations under humanitarian law and the imperatives of justice.

The broader context cannot be ignored: the death penalty in Israeli law remains legally permissible under certain emergency regulations, though in practice executions are exceedingly rare. For Palestinians, however, this shift signals a dangerous normalisation of violent reprisal through formal statute. The legislation comes amid mounting pressure on the entire legal and prison system to treat Palestinian detainees as a separate category, one where the rights of the accused, transparency and review are severely diminished.

In effect, the proposed bill may convert what was once de facto execution through neglect and mistreatment into de jure death sentences. As Younis observes, this is not simply escalation, but the legalisation of oppression, an attempt to embed within law what was previously enacted extrajudicially. He urges the international community to view the bill not as a domestic matter of internal security, but as part of a broader campaign of elimination, warranting referral to international legal mechanisms and holding senior Israeli officials liable.

Given the decades of documented rights-abuses in Israeli detention of Palestinians, this development demands urgent global attention. The transformation of prisons from places of detention to sites of potential mass execution represents a dramatic turning point. It raises serious questions about the rule of law, fair trial guarantees and the ability of the international legal system to respond when a captive population is systematically targeted through legislative means.