Israeli authorities plan the construction of penitentiary facilities with a wing dedicated to the executions of prisoners sentenced to death, a space that will include a stand to observe the hangings, according to Israeli broadcaster i24News on Wednesday. The initiative, promoted by the Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben Gvir, includes an execution room with a glassed observation area from which relatives of victims of attacks will be able to witness the hangings.
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The project is framed within the law approved by the Knesset last March, which establishes the mandatory death penalty for Palestinians tried by military courts for the murder of Israelis. This is the first time Israel enables infrastructure of this type and represents a radical escalation of a policy that, until now, had only been applied with the execution of Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann in 1962.
“We promised and fulfilled our promise to pass a death penalty law for terrorists. We are making history,” the minister said in a video recorded in front of the foundations of the penitentiary center, whose location has not been revealed to the media. In his recent appearances, Ben Gvir has insisted that Palestinians convicted of blood crimes against Israelis must face the harshest punishment provided by the legal system.
In an interview with Rom Braslavski, a former soldier kidnapped on October 7 during the Hamas attack, Ben Gvir promised his interlocutor that he would try to allow him to personally participate in the execution of Palestinian prisoners. “You are the right person in the right place to carry out hangings and executions one after another”, he told Braslavski in his podcast. “They do not deserve to live”, he added. Other statements by the minister in this same interview sparked controversy when he defended the need to “kill 30 or 40 Palestinians [terrorists] in Gaza every night”, arguing that “they are not even people.”
In the same podcast, the minister reviewed the changes introduced since his arrival at the post at the end of 2022. “During my visits to the prisons, there used to be jam, chocolate, televisions, table tennis, and meat, it was crazy,” he said. “Today we face a completely different reality. They are suffering, they are having a hard time, and they are in a terrible situation. I am glad they are suffering,” he added.
A few weeks ago, Ben Gvir himself promoted a controversial project to dig a moat around the maximum-security Ketziot prison in the Negev desert, and fill it with crocodiles. The initiative, which aimed to deter escapes of Palestinian inmates through a moat with predators, was temporarily suspended by order of an Israeli court. The judge accepted a lawsuit from an animal protection group that warned of mistreatment of the reptiles and changes in the local fauna that could result from introducing an animal species from outside the territory.
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