On August 18, Israel's National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir posted a video of himself standing at a construction site. Behind him, workers were building a wing to hold condemned prisoners. In the middle of it, he said, Israel is building a gallows.
"Terrorists will be executed" there, he declared, pointing at the unfinished structure. He did not say where it is, beyond central Israel, and he did not say when it will be done. He did say the facility will include viewing booths, so families of victims can sit and watch a man die at the end of a rope.
Mandatory Hanging Sentence
On March 30, 2026, Israel's parliament passed the "Death Penalty for Terrorists Law" by a vote of 62 to 48. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu walked into the chamber to cast his vote in person. Ben-Gvir, whose far-right Jewish Power party wrote the bill, celebrated with champagne. The law took effect in May.
Here’s what it does:
If a military court convicts someone of a killing classified as an act of terrorism, the court must impose death by hanging. Not may — must. Judges can substitute life in prison only if they find unspecified "special circumstances."
Prosecutors don't even have to ask for the death sentence; it applies anyway. Once a sentence is final, it must be carried out within 90 days. Commutation and pardon are barred.
And here is the part that matters most: military courts try Palestinians. Israeli citizens and residents — including settlers living in the same occupied West Bank — are explicitly excluded and tried in civilian courts, where the death penalty applies only to a killing committed with the intent of "negating the existence of the State of Israel," a motive nearly impossible to prove in practice.
Human Rights Watch called the law discriminatory by design and said it entrenches "hallmarks of apartheid." Israel's own human rights organization B'Tselem notes that West Bank military courts convict roughly 96% of the time, often on confessions pulled from detainees under duress and torture.
The law also restricts a condemned prisoner's access to a lawyer, limits family visits, curtails outside oversight of the execution itself, and grants legal immunity to everyone who carries it out.
It contains no exemption for children.
Israel is Building a Gallows. What Does the World Say?
The condemnation was immediate and it has not let up.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk urged Israel to repeal the law the day after it passed, warning that applying capital punishment to residents of occupied territory would amount to a war crime. A group of UN special rapporteurs said the law "singles out Palestinians for execution" and asked Israel's Supreme Court to strike it down before irreversible harm is done.
The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination called it a grave erosion of human rights and demanded repeal. As of January 2026, that committee counted 9,243 Palestinians in Israeli custody — 3,385 of them administrative detainees, held without charge or trial.
The UN Special Rapporteur on torture, Alice Jill Edwards, made the point that should stop anyone cold: in a detention system where torture has been documented for years, the death penalty forecloses any remedy when a confession turns out to have been beaten out of someone. You cannot un-hang a man.
The Association for Civil Rights in Israel petitioned Israel's Supreme Court the day the law passed, arguing the Knesset had no authority to legislate capital punishment over West Bank Palestinians who are not its citizens. That challenge is still pending.
The Man Holding the Hammer
Ben-Gvir runs Israel's prisons and its national police. He is a follower of the late Meir Kahane, and in 2007 an Israeli court convicted him of racist incitement and supporting a terrorist organization. This year, friends made him a birthday cake decorated with a noose.
The gallows announcement came days after he promised former hostage Rom Braslavski he would work to let him personally hang his captor. In the same stretch of days, on a podcast, Ben-Gvir called for targeted killings of 30 to 40 people in Gaza every night — not only people posing an immediate threat — and said some of them were not even people.
Germany, France, and UN Secretary-General António Guterres all condemned the remarks. France has already barred him from entering the country. A push for EU-wide sanctions has stalled because sanctions require all 27 member states to agree, and some refuse.
Israel has executed exactly one person by civilian court order in its history: Adolf Eichmann, in 1962, quietly, in a small room at Ramla Prison, with no audience.
That restraint is what is being dismantled — not just the moratorium, but the idea that killing a prisoner is a solemn last resort rather than a show. A viewing booth is not a legal necessity. It is a design choice. Someone drew it, someone approved it, and someone is pouring concrete for it right now.
