Israel's Knesset late on Monday passed in second and third readings the "Prosecution Law for the October 7 Massacre", creating a dedicated military tribunal in Jerusalem to try the roughly 400 Hamas operatives captured during the October 7, 2023 attack. The vote was 93 in favour to 0 against, with broad support across the coalition and most of the opposition — a margin almost unprecedented for security legislation in the current parliament.
The law builds a legal framework for capital punishment in cases where defendants are convicted of genocide under the new statute. The death-penalty provision, the first in Israeli criminal law since the 1962 execution of Adolf Eichmann, was a sticking point in committee but was preserved in the final text after Likud, Religious Zionism and the New Hope faction insisted on it.
The tribunal will sit in a purpose-built facility on the grounds of the Russian Compound in Jerusalem, with proceedings broadcast on a dedicated website and televised in shortened nightly summaries. Trials are expected to begin in early 2027 after a six-month organisational phase. Defendants from the Nukhba force — the unit of Hamas's Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades that led the cross-border raid into Israeli kibbutzim and the Nova music festival — will be tried in groups defined by the operational cell to which they belonged.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told reporters at the Knesset that the legislation was "necessary to deliver justice with the full weight of the rule of law" and emphasised that proceedings would be public and recorded "so that the world can see". Opposition leader Yair Lapid voted in favour but in remarks afterwards stressed that "the test of this law is not its passage but its administration".
The Israeli human-rights group Adalah called the tribunal "fundamentally incompatible with the right to life, the presumption of innocence, judicial independence and the rule of law", and announced a constitutional petition to be filed at the Supreme Court within a fortnight. The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights said it would "examine the legislation in detail" and expressed concern about the introduction of capital punishment.
The roughly 400 defendants are currently held at high-security facilities at Ofer and Ketziot. Israeli prosecutors have said that the cases will be tried in cohorts of 20 to 30 to allow common evidence to be presented once rather than reopened in each trial. The first cohort, sources at the State Attorney's Office told local media, will focus on the assault on Kibbutz Be'eri.
The legislation's passage closes a 19-month gap between the attack and the formal legal architecture under which the captured attackers will be tried. Public support for capital punishment for October 7 perpetrators has consistently polled at 75 per cent or higher in Israeli surveys since late 2023, the highest level recorded for any death-penalty question in the country's polling history.