What is happening in Israeli prisons can no longer be read as a series of isolated abuses or as circumstantial deviations inherent to a prolonged conflict. The accumulated reports of Palestinian, Israeli, and United Nations organizations describe a coherent, progressive, and deliberate architecture of dehumanization, which today allows one to speak with solid grounds of a process of structural elimination of the detained Palestinian population.
For years, Israel has systematically expanded the definition of “terrorism” applied to the Palestinian population. Under the regime of occupation and military justice, conduct that in any other context would be treated as minor offenses or acts of protest—including stone-throwing, even by minors—is classified as a serious threat to security. This conceptual elasticity is not accidental: it allows virtually any form of resistance to be absorbed into an absolute, morally sealed, and legally extreme penal category.
On this first pillar rests the second: a system of detention that can no longer be described as punitive, but as destructive. Reports by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights and Israeli organizations such as B’Tselem document consistent patterns of torture, cruel treatment, systematic humiliation, sexual violence, prolonged isolation, and the deliberate deprivation of basic living conditions. Added to this is a severe and widespread deterioration of medical care in prison, including allegations of negligence toward chronic and potentially life-threatening illnesses. The denial of treatment does not appear as an administrative failure, but as part of a regime of abandonment that accelerates the physical and psychological deterioration of detainees.
This framework is not new, but since October 2023 it has intensified and become normalized. Detention ceases to function as a legal tool and instead becomes a space of suspended humanity. The Palestinian prisoner is reduced to an administered body, punished and expendable.
It is in this context that the current debate over reinstating the death penalty takes on radical gravity. This is not an abstract discussion about extreme punishments, but the introduction of the ultimate sanction into a system that is already degraded, discriminatory, and operated largely by military courts. United Nations experts have warned that this project would have a clearly discriminatory impact and would violate the right to life, precisely because it would be applied to a population previously stripped of effective legal guarantees and subjected to expansive definitions of “terrorism.”
Added to this warning is a central political and operational fact: the bill that would allow the imposition of the death penalty for offenses classified as “terrorism” has already been approved in first reading in the Knesset. Although it has not yet become final law, this legislative advance has, in parallel, activated concrete preparations within the Israeli prison system. Israeli media have reported that the Prison Service has begun planning the infrastructure and logistics necessary to apply capital punishment, including the adaptation of spaces intended for executions and the drafting of internal procedures. According to those reports, the method under consideration would be hanging, which entails the preparation of courtyards or specific areas and the organization of the personnel involved. It is therefore not a remote hypothesis, but an operational anticipation conditioned on the final approval of the law.
The sequence is clear and requires no forced interpretations. First, the enemy is redefined until it becomes omnipresent. Then, it is confined within a system that destroys bodies and wills through torture, hunger, and medical abandonment. Finally, the normative and logistical framework advances to eliminate it legally. Each stage rests on the previous one. Each step lowers the threshold of the unthinkable.
Speaking of a “final solution” is not, here, a rhetorical gesture or a superficial historical comparison. It is an analytical category that describes a process: the progressive, legalized, and administratively managed elimination of a population considered irreducible, dangerous, and expendable. It is not necessary for executions to have begun for the danger to be real. The danger lies in the structure, not in the final act.
The explicit indifference of the Israeli state toward international law reinforces this reading. United Nations resolutions, reports by special rapporteurs, and precautionary measures by international courts have been ignored without effective political cost. When a state ceases even to simulate respect for international legality, what remains is the naked exercise of force, sustained by a closed and self-referential legal language.
What is worrying today is not a future law nor a hypothetical threat. It is the internal coherence of a system that already operates under logics of slow extermination. Waiting for the final step to materialize in order to name it would be an ethical abdication. Responsible journalism does not certify catastrophes after the fact: it identifies their signs while they can still be recognized as a warning.
Here, the signs are all in plain sight. And they are documented.