Ahead of Sunday’s security cabinet meeting several ministers of Israel’s right-wing government have called for the Palestinian young man who carried out a recent deadly attack in Halamish to be executed.
The ministers called for passing the death penalty for 19-year-old Palestinian Omar al-Abed who infiltrated into a house in the illegal settlement of Halamish in the West Bank last Friday night and stabbed to death three Jewish settlers from the same family in retaliation to Israeli measures at the Aqsa Mosque.
Israeli war minister Avigdor Lieberman said in an interview with Ynet that with such incident there is certainly a place for the death sentence in the corridors of West Bank military courts.
Education minister Naftali Bennett also said that the option of death penalty exists in Israeli military courts and that there is no need for legislation.
He called on the military prosecution to demand the death penalty for Abed.
Justice minister Ayelet Shaked also called for going to military courts to extract a capital punishment verdict against the young man.
Transportation and intelligence minister Yisrael Katz made similar comments on Saturday night. He also said that he would raise the demand in the cabinet meeting and that the attorney-general told him that the death penalty was a possibility if it was the security cabinet’s position.
Although Israel’s military courts had reportedly not issued death sentences since 1962 its military and security forces have been carrying out “shoot-to-kill” orders for long years extrajudicially executing scores of Palestinians on site when they could have been subdued or disarmed through non-lethal means.
