LONDON: The footage, secretly filmed by an onlooker and released by Reuters with a “graphic content” warning, is shocking.

On Nov. 27, Israeli border police raiding a building in the West Bank camp of Jenin summarily executed two men who had surrendered. The Palestinian health ministry later named the dead men as Montasir Abdullah, 26, and Yusuf Asasa, 37.

Summary executions of Palestinians by Israeli security forces are nothing new, as a spokesman for the UN Human Rights Office pointed out in a statement after the Jenin killings.

“We are appalled by the brazen killing by Israeli border police yesterday of two Palestinian men in Jenin in the occupied West Bank, in yet another apparent summary execution,” he said.

“Killings of Palestinians by Israeli security forces and settlers in the occupied West Bank have been surging without any accountability, even in the rare case when investigations are announced.”

Israel launched Operation Iron Fist in Jenin in January, later expanding it in February to include the Tulkarem and Nur Shams camps. The military says it is targeting Iran-backed armed groups that had grown stronger in the camps and were launching attacks against Israelis.

What began as a series of targeted raids to neutralize Palestinian armed groups and protect Israeli settlements has since become a sustained military campaign, in which the Israel Defense Forces have been accused of extreme violence.

Far from addressing this behavior, Israeli politicians are instead trying to push through a new law that would make execution mandatory for Palestinians — not for Jewish Israelis — convicted of terrorist killings.

The Penal Bill (Amendment No. 159) (Death Penalty for Terrorists) stipulates that “a person who caused the death of an Israeli citizen deliberately or through indifference, from a motive of racism or hostility against a population, and with the aim of harming the State of Israel and the national revival of the Jewish people in its land, shall be sentenced to death.”

The amendment adds that “in military courts in the Judea and Samaria region (the Israeli term for the West Bank) it will be possible to impose a death penalty by a regular majority of the judges in the panel, and a death penalty that was imposed cannot be commuted.”

The military courts have a conviction rate close to 99 percent.

Having passed its first reading in the Knesset on Nov. 11, the bill has now been returned to Israel’s National Security Committee for deliberation. It must then pass two more readings in the Knesset to become law.

Israel’s penal law already provides for the death penalty, but it has only been sought, and carried out, once since 1948.

In December 1961, Adolf Eichmann, the former head of Nazi Germany’s Department for Jewish Affairs, was found guilty in an Israeli court of having played “a central and decisive part” in the killing of 6 million European Jews.

On June 1, 1962, Eichmann, who had been captured in Argentina by Israeli agents, was hanged at Ramla Prison near Tel Aviv.

The amendment to the new law has been proposed by Israel’s far-right Jewish Power party, whose leader is Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister. When the bill passed its first reading last month, Ben-Gvir celebrated by handing out sweets to members of the Knesset.

“After the law is finally passed,” he said, “terrorists will only be released to hell.”

During the debate on the vote, a scuffle broke out in the Knesset between Ben-Gvir and Ayman Odeh, chairman of Hadash-Ta’al.

In his speech, Odeh told Ben-Gvir: “You wanted to carry out a transfer, and you failed — therefore you are in an ideological crisis. You will be gone, and the Palestinian people will remain.”

In a statement after the vote, Odeh said: “The death penalty law for terrorists is the ultimate proof that this coalition has failed miserably and has failed to remove the Palestinian issue from the agenda. And it will never succeed. This law is the swan song of the occupation.”

Just over two weeks later, Ben-Gvir not only defended but celebrated the two summary executions carried out in Jenin. He gave his “full backing to border police members and IDF fighters who shot at wanted terrorists who came out of a building in Jenin.”

He added: “The fighters acted exactly as expected of them — terrorists must die.” Three days after the shootings, Ben-Gvir promoted the commander of the unit that had carried out the killings.

The proposed introduction of the death penalty has been condemned by human rights groups inside Israel and around the world, not least because of the undemocratic nature of the vote that saw the amendment pass its first reading.

There are 120 members of the Knesset, of whom just 39 voted in favor of the bill and 16 against.

“So the bill was passed when they didn’t even have 50 percent of the Knesset to vote for a bill actually asking to kill more Palestinians,” said Mutahir Ahmed, head of legal for the UK-based International Centre of Justice for Palestinians.

“That shows how tainted the system of democracy is in Israel.”

There was, said Amnesty International’s advocacy director, Erika Guevara Rosas, in a statement, “no sugarcoating this; a majority of 39 Israeli Knesset members approved in a first reading a bill that effectively mandates courts to impose the death penalty exclusively against Palestinians … and would include those who committed the punishable offences before the law is passed.”

Yair Dvir, spokesperson for B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, told Arab News the proposed amendment was “a continuation of the deep demonization process that the Palestinians have undergone for years, and under this current government and in the past two years of genocide even more so.

“They are making a very clear distinction in this law, which is just intended for Palestinians. The death penalty would not be used in the case of any Jewish terrorism, because of course at the same time as they are about to create a death penalty for Palestinians, they are supporting Jewish terrorists, they are backing them politically, funding them, giving them weapons, and creating full immunity for settlers who kill Palestinians.”

The proposed amendment, he added, was “another step in Ben-Gvir’s war against Palestinian prisoners, which we have seen for a long time.

“Prisoners have already been killed in Israeli prisons, so actually the killing of Palestinian prisoners has already started. But now they want to make it legal.”

In a report published last month, Israeli non-profit Physicians for Human Rights said the past two years of detention had already proved to be “a death sentence” for almost 100 Palestinians.

The report revealed that between the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on southern Israel that triggered the Gaza war and August this year, at least 94 Palestinians had died in Israeli detention facilities.

The victims, killed by “the systemic denial of medical care and the torture of Palestinians in Israeli custody,” have included “the young and elderly, the healthy and the sick alike.”

The report added that “the fate of hundreds of Palestinians from Gaza detained by the Israeli military remains unknown to this day, suggesting that the true number of deaths is likely significantly higher than those documented here.”

As part of their campaign to introduce the death penalty, Ben-Gvir and his supporters have taken to wearing noose-shaped pins on their lapels.

Ben-Gvir, said Yair Dvir, “has been talking about this for years. But now, after the hostages have been released and he doesn’t have to think what Hamas might do, it’s an opportunity before elections to show the public just how far he wants to go in this fight against Palestinians in general, and specifically against prisoners.”

Ahmed said the proposed amendment was “a racist bill which violates international human rights law.”

It also violates European law. “Any country that wants to be part of the EU has to sign the European Convention on Human Rights, according to which the death penalty is against human rights and is not acceptable,” he said.

Israel is not in Europe. But controversially, it is in the Eurovision Song Contest, which is due to be held in Vienna next May. Several nations are now boycotting the competition, including Iceland, Spain, the Netherlands and Ireland, over Israel’s conduct in Gaza.

“This is a racist law that extends the apartheid legal system that Israel has been operating for many decades,” said Ahmed.

Palestinians are subject to trials in military courts, in which the conviction rate is about 99 percent, “and if this amendment becomes law, they will face the death penalty.”

He added: “What this amendment also intends is that there should be no provision for appeal or reduction of sentence. That means that if there is a miscarriage of justice, which is perfectly possible in any judicial system, it could not be rectified, even if new evidence comes to light.”

Even in the best justice systems in the world, mistakes are made, he said. “Our British judicial system is considered one of the best, but even here we have serious miscarriages of justice.”

It is not clear when the bill will undergo its second reading. But a leaked message between members of the National Security Committee reviewing the amendment revealed they were considering inserting a clause mandating that executions should be carried out by lethal injection within 90 days of conviction, to prevent “any possibility of avoiding carrying out the sentence.”