Knesset set to cast final votes on death penalty bill for terrorists

The Knesset is set to vote on the far-right Otzma Yehudit party’s controversial bill to legislate the death penalty for terrorists in its second and third readings.

The bill is likely to be passed despite reported pressure from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and Otzma Yehudit chair to withdraw the bill.

It is among a series of last-minute laws that the coalition is trying to advance prior to the end of the current Knesset legislative session tomorrow and the beginning of the Knesset’s Passover recess.

Democrats MK Gilad Kariv, who sits on the Knesset National Security Committee and has been among the fiercest opponents of the bill, says the bill amounts to an election stunt and writes in a post on X that it is “immoral, un-Jewish, undemocratic, and yes, also ineffective from a security standpoint.”

“Opposition members who do not clearly and unequivocally oppose this law are buying golden shares in the takeover of the State of Israel by Kahanism,” he adds.

Right-wing opposition party Yisrael Beytenu has said it will vote in favor of the legislation if both Netanyahu and Shas chairman Aryeh Deri show up in person to vote in favor.

Source: Times of Israel, Ariela Karmel, March 30, 2026

"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."

— Oscar Wilde

Death Penalty News For a World without the Death Penalty

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Arizona | Death Row Inmate Challenges Execution Warrant, Citing 2025 Cyberattack and Protocol Failures

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Iranian Gay Activist: "They Forced Me to Watch Executions So I Would Know How Mine Would Be"

Iranian LGBT activist now living as a refugee in Spain. He was sentenced to death by the ayatollah regime for being homosexual and for his support campaign for the community. "The enemy was already at home," he says about the current war In 11 countries around the world, homosexuality is punishable by death - it is criminalized in almost 70 countries. One of them is the Islamic Republic of Iran, from where Ramtin Zigorat (Tabriz, 1988) managed to escape after avoiding a death sentence and enduring the worst tortures. He has been living as a refugee in Spain for six and a half years. Question . His life, his testimony, can help us better understand what the Iranian Islamist regime is. I believe that until adolescence, you did not fully understand that you were homosexual.

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Texas: Dexter Darnell Johnson to die on August 15; Larry Ray Swearingen on August 21

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