Israel passes law setting up military tribunal which can sentence 7 October attackers to death

In the October 7 assault led by Hamas, terrorists killed more than 1,200 people in Israel and took 251 hostages.

Hundreds of Hamas terrorists accused of committing war crimes during their October 2023 attack could face the death penalty after Israel late Monday approved the creation of a special military tribunal to prosecute their cases.

In a rare show of Israeli political unity, the legislation received broad backing from both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition and much of the opposition, passing with 93 votes in favor and zero against.

The Israeli parliament on Monday approved in its second and third readings a bill titled the “Prosecution law for the October 7 Massacre.” The legislation creates a dedicated tribunal, operating as a military court, to handle the prosecution of roughly 400 Hamas terrorists from the Nukhba Force who have been held in Israel since the attack, an Israeli official told CNN.

The law includes a legal framework that will allow the death penalty for those convicted of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and murder under aggravated circumstances. According to the bill’s explanatory notes, its purpose is “to regulate the prosecution of those responsible for acts of hostility, murder, sexual violence, abduction, and looting carried out by Hamas and its affiliates as part of the coordinated and deliberate terrorist attack against Israeli civilians beginning on October 7, 2023.” The legislation also covers offenses committed afterward against hostages taken to the Gaza Strip.

The special tribunal will be based in Jerusalem. Its proceedings will be public and recorded via audio and video, and key hearings will be broadcast on a dedicated website. Judicial panels will be headed by sitting or retired district court judges. The bill also stipulates that funding for the defendants’ legal representation will be deducted from funds transferred to the Palestinian Authority.

Yulia Malinovsky, one of the bill’s sponsors and a lawmaker from the opposition Yisrael Beytenu party, compared the tribunal to a “modern Eichmann trial.” A key architect of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann was convicted in a landmark trial in Israel and was executed in 1962 — one of only two people ever executed in Israel’s history.

Israel’s penal code already includes capital punishment for some of the charges the October 7 terrorists are likely to face, but the country has maintained a de facto moratorium on executions since 1962. The new law provides the specific framework to enable its use in these cases. If handed down, a death sentence would trigger an automatic appeal on behalf of the defendant.

Because the bill empowers a panel of judges to hand down the death penalty by a majority vote — and requires the trials to be conducted in a livestreamed Jerusalem courtroom — it has drawn comparisons to Eichmann’s 1961–62 trial, which was broadcast live on television.

Simcha Rothman, one of the bill’s sponsors from Prime Minister Netanyahu’s ruling coalition, said the overwhelming consensus for the bill shows Israeli lawmakers can come together “around a common mission.”

Several Israeli rights groups — including Hamoked, Adalah and the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel — said that while “justice for the victims of October 7 is a legitimate and urgent imperative,” any accountability “must be pursued through a process which includes rather than abandons the principles of justice.”

This bill is separate from a different law passed in March 2026 that made the death penalty the default sentence for certain future terrorism-related murders in military courts. That earlier legislation is not retroactive and therefore does not apply to the October 7 attacks.

In the October 7 assault led by Hamas, the Palestinian group that controlled the Gaza Strip, terrorists killed more than 1,200 people in Israel and took 251 hostages. The unprecedented 2023 attack by the Palestinian terrorist group is the worst attack on Jewish people since the Holocaust.

Two men were executed in Israel since its founding in 1948.

Meir Tobianski, an IDF officer, was executed by firing squad on 30 June 1948 after a hasty wartime court-martial convicted him of treason for allegedly passing information to Jordanian forces; he was posthumously exonerated in 1949.

The second and final execution was that of Adolf Eichmann, a key architect of the Holocaust, who was hanged at Ramla Prison at midnight between May 31 and June 1, 1962, following his landmark trial in Jerusalem. Eichmann remains the only person executed in Israel after a full civilian judicial process.

Source: NPR, SkyNews, CNN, DPN, Staff, May 12, 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

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