Knesset Israeli Parliament building

ISRAEL: KNESSET PASSES LAW ESTABLISHING MILITARY TRIBUNAL TO TRY OCTOBER 7 PERPETRATORS

May 12, 2026:

The Knesset on May 11, 2026 night passed a law to establish a special military tribunal to try Palestinian terrorists accused of committing atrocities during the October 7, 2023, invasion, with 93 votes in favor and none opposed.
Submitted jointly by Religious Zionism MK Simcha Rothman, of the coalition, and Yisrael Beytenu MK Yulia Malinovsky, of the opposition, the rare bipartisan legislation would see the establishment of a special court within the military justice system to try the roughly 300 alleged terrorists captured by security forces inside Israel during the invasion and held in detention since.
Under the legislation, the tribunal will be able to charge the assailants with all relevant crimes, including genocide under the terms of Israel’s 1950 Law for the Prevention of Genocide, harming Israeli sovereignty, causing war, assisting an enemy during a time of war, and terror charges under Israel’s 2016 law for combating terrorism.
Those convicted of genocide charges would be liable for the death penalty.
Justice Minister Yariv Levin called the passage of the legislation “one of the most important moments of the current Knesset. One can feel that we are doing the right thing by finding a way to unite at this moment, even though we are on the eve of elections and despite all the disagreements that exist.”
“This is a historic framework intended to deliver justice and bring to trial the terrorists who carried out the worst massacre in the state’s history,” said Rothman, while Malinovsky proclaimed that “these will be the trials of the modern-day Nazis, and they will go down in the history books.”
Malinovsky dedicated the law to “the murdered victims, the hostages, and their families. In the end, our spirit and our ability to cope with and stand in the face of immense pain — that is what makes us great.”
Between 5,000 and 6,000 Palestinian terrorists, mostly from Hamas but including other terror groups, invaded Israel on October 7, 2023, by land, air, and sea, at multiple points on the Israel-Gaza border, and carried out a series of massacres in which some 1,200 people were killed. It was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.
The assailants also abducted 251 people as hostages and took them captive to the Gaza Strip, while committing a wave of other atrocities, including rape and torture, documenting the savagery on bodycams they wore during the attack, and posting the footage online and in messages to the victims’ families.
Malinovsky, the law’s cosponsor, emphasized that Israel is “governed by law” and that those accused will “stand trial in court, according to all the rules, and the judges will hand down their sentences. There will be an orderly legal process, filmed and broadcast.”
Trials will be open to the public and broadcast on a website set up for that purpose.