Hamas says death penalty for terrorists will ‘open the gates of hell’ against Israel

The preliminary reading of the bill against terrorist murderers passed 55-9 in Knesset.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Palestinian Arab terrorists will not be deterred if Israel passes a new law making easier to impose the death penalty on terrorist murderers, a Hamas spokesman told the Al-Risala news site Thursday, saying such a law would only serve to ‘open the gates of hell’ for Israelis.

“If the occupation implements its decision, it will open the gates of hell on itself, and it will face an uprising that uproots its existence,” said Hazem Hasanein, a spokesman for Hamas’ Palestinian Prisoners Information Bureau. “It will realize that it has committed the greatest foolishness in its history, and then it will see the death bags containing the bodies of its soldiers, settlers and bandits.”

The Hamas terrorist organization, which rules the Gaza Strip, regularly uses the death penalty. The death penalty is applied for offenses such as crimes against Islamic law, land sales to Israelis, and treason, such as by collaborating with Israel. Just last September, it announced that it had executed five men, two for such collaboration and three following criminal convictions.

The government passed the preliminary reading of the death penalty bill in the Knesset Wednesday 55-9, with most of the Opposition absenting itself from the vote.

The bill’s explanatory notes said its aim was “to nip terrorism in the bud and create a weighty deterrent.” The practice of “all the murderers receiv[ing] comfortable conditions in prison and salaries from the Palestinian Authority” had to end, it said, as did the phenomenon of releasing terrorists “who have served half their sentences.”

MK Limor Son Har-Melech (Otzma Yehudit) sponsored the bill, while attaching to it a similar bill written by MK Oded Forer of Israel Beiteinu, a party now in the Opposition, which passed in its preliminary reading in 2018 but then went no further. Israel Beiteinu voted in favor of the bill Wednesday.

Son Har-Melech, whose first husband was killed in a terrorist attack in which she was wounded, called the bill “the moral, just and necessary demand to fight back against anyone who tries to undermine our existence here in the State of Israel, and to murder Jews and annihilate us only because we chose to live here, on our homeland’s soil.”

“This demand has come after decades of disgraced national pride and thousands of people murdered, until the nation of Israel cried out: Enough. Enough with the national humiliation, enough with the terror, enough with this absurd reality in which murderers of Jews continue to live on this earth,” she continued.

Her party’s leader, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, called the measure “a morally appropriate punishment” even if it “will not eradicate terrorism entirely.”

“In a place where terror has become a national plague, where Jews are afraid to walk the city streets, where a vile terrorist opens fire near a synagogue, and keeps firing – we have a duty to institute the death penalty,” he said in the plenum. “If we do not enact this law, we will not be moral and humane towards our children and families.”

The Ministerial Committee for Legislative Matters had rejected the opinion of Attorney-General Gila Beharev-Miara, who opposed the bill on several grounds, including that ideological terrorists would not be deterred by the threat of death.

The Palestinian Authority put out a statement calling the bill a “cruel, barbaric, and inhumane” one that is “rooted in Jewish supremacy.” If it is passed into law, Palestinians will be “arbitrarily…put on death row,” it said.

The bill stipulates that the death penalty would be mandatory for anyone who “intentionally or out of indifference causes the death of an Israeli citizen when the act is carried out from a racist motive or hate to a certain public… and with the purpose of harming the State of Israel and the rebirth of the Jewish people in its homeland.”

It would also apply in Judea and Samaria, which is formally under military law. Only two of three military judges would have to agree to apply the death penalty in terror cases under the new bill, rather than the unanimous agreement currently required.

Death penaltyHamasIsrael BeiteinuItamar Ben-GvirLimor Son Har-Melech