Israel’s show trials and mass executions for Palestinians seized on Oct. 7, 2023

Israeli protestors against the death penalty bill for Palestinians that was passed by the Knesset on March 30, 2026.

In my new article on my website, Israel Approves Lawless Show Trials and Mass Executions for Palestinians Seized on Oct. 7, 2023, I compare and contrast ongoing efforts by the international legal community to hold Israel to account for its war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, as Israel itself sinks deeper into extralegal depravity.

On accountability, the beleaguered International Criminal Court (ICC) is reportedly seeking an arrest warrant for Bezalel Smotrich, the far-right Minister of Finance in Netanyahu’s coalition government, for forced displacement as a crime against humanity and a war crime, the transfer of Israel’s own population as a war crime, and persecution and apartheid as crimes against humanity.

This would be the third arrest warrant for senior Israeli officials, following the ground-breaking arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and the former Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant in November 2024, which triggered a witch hunt against chief prosecutor Karim Khan KC, involving what appears to have been a confected sexual misconduct scandal.

Unfortunately, other arrest warrants have not yet materialized — for Israel Katz, the grotesquely belligerent Minister of Defense who took over from Gallant, and, especially for Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right Kahanist thug who is the Minister of National Security.

Yesterday’s video of Ben-Gvir humiliating the Global Sumud Flotilla activists illegally intercepted in international waters and brought to Israel has briefly shone a spotlight on his particular brand of violent supremacist malevolence, but his role in Israel’s crimes is much more significant than this, as he is responsible for the police, and for Israel’s reviled prison system for Palestinians, where, as I describe it, “the torture, abuse and rape of Palestinian prisoners has become normalized since October 7, 2023, where at least 100 prisoners have been killed, where 75 doctors and medical staff seized in Gaza are still held without charge or trial, and from which the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the globally-recognized international monitor of prison conditions, has been completely banned for the last 31 months, a scandal that should be a source of profound international outrage.”

Ben-Gvir is also the most vocal supporter, within the government, of sickening new laws approving the death penalty for Palestinians — the “Death Penalty for Terrorists” law passed by the Knesset at the end of March, and the “Prosecution of Participants in the October 7 Massacre Events” law, passed on May 11, which authorized the creation of a special military tribunal to prosecute the Palestinians, estimated to be between 250 and 300 in number, who were seized in Israel on October 7, 2023.

A screenshot from a tour of an Israeli prison for Palestinian prisoners, allegedly Hamas’ elite “Nukhba” forces, broadcast on Israel’s Channel 13 in February 2024.

Israel’s military courts for Palestinians have long been condemned for their fundamental bias and unfairness, the use of so-called “evidence” derived through the use of torture, and a conviction rate that is close to 100%, but the new tribunal, while entrenching this fundamental lawlessness, will also be empowered to deliver the death penalty, which, while noticeably and vengefully anachronistic, in a world in which strenuous efforts have been made to successfully abandon this barbaric practice, is also supposed to require the strictest adherence to objectively fair and transparent trials.

I compare the plans with the military commissions at Guantánamo, introduced by Dick Cheney, who had the same intentions, but was rapidly derailed by internal dissent from principled prosecutors who refused to take part in “show trials” using torture evidence to deliver the death penalty. The commissions bounced back from condemnation by the Supreme Court in 2006, and were ill-advisedly revived by President Obama in 2009, but they have, ever since, limped on without credibility, mired in the insoluble paradox of seeking justice for individuals tortured by those seeking to convict them.

Israel, however, has no such compunctions, as its long history of unfair trials, and its generally corrupted and compliant judiciary reveals. “As a result”, I explain, Israel “presumably thinks, with its typical overweening arrogance, that its show trials will actually demonstrate the truth of its incessantly misplaced sense of victimhood, and the justifiable vengeance of its delivery of appropriate punishment.”

As I add, “Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. If its special military tribunal goes ahead, it will only open Israel up to global confirmation of how it is prepared, with gleefully vindictive enthusiasm, to sacrifice all notions of justice on the altar of vengeance.”

And, as a noticeable example, I recall Ben-Gvir visiting a prison last November, and, over the bound bodies of prisoners lying facedown on the floor, declaring that they were all terrorists, and that, despite their deliberately severe conditions of confinement, what still needed to be done was to subject them all to the death penalty.

Read the whole article here.

Other news

In other news, Israel is releasing the 430 activists from the Global Sumud Flotilla who were illegally seized in international waters — an act of piracy — and brought to Israel via a process of “extraordinary rendition.” I wrote about the flotilla in Substack Notes here, here and here, and can only conclude that their sudden release, as opposed to being held for a week or more and subjected to further abuse, is the result of the shameful video that Itamar Ben-Gvir posted yesterday.

I also asked supporters to join me in marking 8,900 days of Guantánamo’s existence this Sunday, May 24, reflected on the defeat of Rep. Thomas Massie — a thorn in the side of Israel, Donald Trump and the Epstein class — in the most expensive House primary in US history, and posted a message from Ben Marmarelli, the lawyer for Marwan Baaghouti, “the Palestinian Mandela’, who was recently prevented from meeting his client on the spurious basis of a “state of emergency” in the prison where he is held.

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