The rapper Lowkey just posted: “Israeli MK Limor Son Har Melech announces the passing of the death penalty for Palestinian hostages with tears of joy in her eyes.”
ZAREFAH BAROUD, [email protected], @
Baroud recently wrote the piece “‘This Arrogant Enemy’: Israel’s Colonial Reversion to the Noose” and is author of a forthcoming book on the subject. Her doctoral dissertation was entitled: “The Colonial Origins of Israel’s Carceral Regime: Examining Colonial and Settler Colonial Applications of Carcerality in Palestine.”
She said today: “The Knesset’s approved legislation will no longer perform the death penalty via lethal injection but rather transform the execution of Palestinian detainees into a colonial spectacle. In other words, the original mode of colonial execution has been restored as the chosen method of capital punishment par excellence.
“Now approved, hanging will once more become a colonial spectacle, which is enacted, in the sterile and removed wording of the National Security Committee, with the aim of ‘cut[ting] off terrorism at its root and creat[ing] a heavy deterrent.’
“It is critical that, as we discuss this ‘new’ policy, we recognize that the extrajudicial execution of prisoners has always been Israel Prison Service (IPS) policy. Ben-Gvir had put forward his proposal, and the Knesset passed the bill into law, at a time (the period since October 7, 2023) when the Israeli authorities have murdered detainees at an unprecedented rate. In April 2023, the Palestinian Commission for Detainees and Ex-Detainees estimated 236 Palestinians had been killed in Israeli custody after 1967, a period of 56 years. In the post-October 7 period, in contrast, almost one hundred Palestinians have died in custody, a killing rate around 10 times the historical average.
“A November 2025 report produced by Physicians for Human Rights Israel suggests that this may actually be a substantial under-estimate, by virtue of the (at least) 14,000 Gazans who are still missing, presumed to be dead or abducted at the time of writing.
“In referring to ‘terrorism’ and the deterrence it is attempting to manufacture, Israel aspires to the aimed incapacitation of the Palestinian national movement and associated military operations targeting the Zionist state. In this regard and others, Ben-Gvir is essentially proposing a reversion to British colonial practice.”
See Baroud’s video from Palestine Deep Dive: “What about the Palestinian Hostages?”
Note: On Monday, IPA’s news release “Murderers Who Flee to Israel” featured Israeli writer David Sheehan. He just noted: “Not a single news outlet in the world will report that while Jewish Power party leader Itamar Ben Gvir spearheaded the passage of Israel’s new law mandating the death penalty for terrorists, the mentor who trained him Baruch Ben Yosef is himself a terrorist who murdered Alex Odeh.”