PALESTINIANS shops and public institutions, including universities, across the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem were closed as people took to the streets to protest against a new Israeli law that imposes the death penalty for Palestinians convicted of deadly attacks.
Hundreds of people gathered on Wednesday to march in Ramallah against the law backed by Israel’s far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, chanting slogans condemning the law and calling on the international community to reverse the law’s passage.
At a protest in the city of Nablus, in the northern West Bank, demonstrators carried signs warning that time was running out.
“Stop the law to execute prisoners, before it’s too late,” one sign read, showing an animation of a prisoner wearing the Palestinian keffiyeh scarf next to a noose.
Most shops in the cities of Hebron, Ramallah, and Nablus were closed with their shutters down at midday, journalists with the AFP news agency reported.
Israeli soldiers forced Palestinian shop owners taking part in the strike in the town of Anata, northeast of Jerusalem’s Old City, to open their businesses.
Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party had called for a general strike the previous day.
United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk has condemned the law, saying “its applications to residents of the occupied Palestinian territory would constitute a war crime”.
At the Ramallah protest, Riman, a 53-year-old psychologist from Ramallah, told AFP that “there isn’t a single person standing here who doesn’t have a brother, a husband, a son, or even a neighbour in prison. There is no Palestinian family without a prisoner.”
More than 9,500 Palestinians are held in Israeli prisons, including 350 children and 73 women. Palestinian and Israeli human rights groups say detainees face torture, starvation and medical neglect, leading to dozens of deaths.
“But honestly, today we feel a lot of anger, because there is also a real weakness in solidarity with them. The occupation [Israel] is betting on the weakness of the street,” said Riman, declining to share her last name.
Under the new law, passed in the Israeli parliament or Knesset late on Monday, Palestinians in the West Bank convicted by military courts of carrying out deadly attacks classified as “terrorism” will face the death penalty as a default sentence.
Because Palestinians in the territory are automatically tried in Israeli military courts, the measure effectively creates a separate and harsher legal track.
In Israeli civilian courts, the law allows for either death or life imprisonment for those convicted of killing with intent to harm the state.
While the law does not provide for retroactive application, critics say the distinction underscores a system of unequal justice.
On social media, Palestinians shared images of tyres being burnt in protest of the law at the Qalandia checkpoint, one of the West Bank’s busiest entry points into Israel via Jerusalem.
“Eyewitnesses reported that Israeli soldiers fired rubber-coated bullets, stun grenades and tear gas” at the protesters, reported the Palestinian news agency WAFA, adding that no injuries had been reported.
Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967 and violence there has soared since the start of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza in October 2023, which has killed more than 72,000 people.