The Shameful Company of Global Executioners that Israel now Keeps

We, the thousands of members of “L’chaim! Jews Against the Death Penalty” across Israel and the world, lament the fact that the two barbaric execution-related bills that a majority of Knesset members have recently passed into law place Israel on a damning list of uncivilized, executing regimes across the globe. It is well known that over 70% of the world’s nations have abolished the death penalty in law or practice. Since Israel’s 1962 execution of Adolf Eichmann (which itself is futile to invoke to justify these laws), it has fallen into the latter category of abolitionist in practice. That reality is no more. Now that Israel’s first death penalty law has just taken effect, with the second soon to follow, executions will soon become a regular feature of Israeli life. Spectacles such as the recent celebration of Texas’s six hundredth execution of the modern era last week, while once unthinkable to many Israelis, will soon be mirrored across Jerusalem.

In 2025, a total of 17 nations globally carried out executions. A closer examination of some of this company Israel now keeps, since rekindling the flame of state-sponsored judicial killings, speaks volumes about the moral failure that the passage of these pieces of legislation represents. Through these new laws, Israel joins a cadre of notorious human rights violators like China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Hamas, Yemen, and the USA, among others. The execution record of these pro-death countries speaks for itself, with Israel’s to follow.

China

Using the most recent available data from the last calendar year, just published in the Amnesty International Global Report: Death Penalty and Executions 2025, it is apparent that China once again topped the list of executors. The exact number of executions in China last year, like many before, remains unknown because the Chinese government classifies this data as a state secret. However, human rights organizations estimate that China executes thousands of people annually, which means it puts more people to death than the rest of the world combined. According to the US-based Dui Hua Foundation, the estimated number of executions has declined steadily in the twenty-first century, from 12,000 each year to 2,400. However, in 2022, the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty announced that since 2007, at least 8,000 people per year were executed in China. Since 2006, the Chinese government has taken effective measures to limit the use of the death penalty, proclaiming that it is doing this to abolish it completely. Of note, Yemen, Vietnam, and North Korea, among others, also keep their execution tallies a secret.

Iran

Among nations that openly execute human beings, Iran often leads the world. In 2025, Iran executed at least 2,159 people—more than double the previous year’s total. This total represents the highest number of recorded executions in the country since 1989. The staggering surge accounts for the vast majority of a global spike in state-sanctioned killings, and has drawn severe condemnation from the United Nations and human rights organizations.

A renewed use of the death penalty for drug-related offenses and sweeping national security charges largely drove the massive increase. At least 795 people were executed for drug-related offenses, often following grossly unfair trials in Revolutionary Courts. Executions tied to politically motivated charges spiked significantly, with dozens executed under vague laws like “armed rebellion,” “corruption on earth,” and “enmity against God”. Ethnic minorities and migrants were disproportionately impacted. For example, at least 84 Afghan nationals were executed. Iranian authorities officially announced fewer than 7% of these executions. At least 11 executions were carried out in public spaces, often in front of crowds that included children.

Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Yemen

Saudi Arabia, another country that welcomes the man-made Angel of Death that is capital punishment, has a grim execution record, executing 356 individuals over the course of 2025. The vast majority were drug-related convictions, although the kingdom also executed individuals for political dissent and crimes allegedly committed as juveniles, violating international laws.

Regarding Iraq, while figures are not yet fully available for 2025, authorities have determined that the state executed at least 63 people in 2024, nearly quadrupling the previous year’s total. The Iraqi government does not publish official statistics on capital punishment, but human rights organizations note that these figures are based on known and verified cases. The vast majority of those put to death were convicted on terrorism-related charges, often tied to former members of ISIS. A significant number of the known executions were carried out at Al-Hut prison in the city of Nasiriyah.

Execution tolls in Yemen are on a similar scale to Iraq. There were at least 51 recorded executions in Yemen in 2025, which represents an increase of more than a third from the at least 38 executions documented in 2024.

The United States, Hamas, Somalia, Singapore, Egypt, and Others

The increasingly autocratic United States carried out 47 executions in 2025, the highest number recorded in 16 years, driven largely by a high volume of death sentences in Florida and Texas, which, as previously mentioned, leads the nation with six hundred in the modern era.

The Gaza Strip came in just after the USA in 2025, when Hamas executed a total of 33 men. These individuals were primarily killed after being accused of collaborating with Israel or committing severe criminal offenses during the ceasefire period. Humanitarian organizations condemned these killings as extrajudicial executions.

According to the UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR), Somalia recorded at least 24 executions in 2025. This figure represents confirmed judicial executions— often handed down by military courts. However, the actual number may be higher, as local clan-based or summary executions also occur in certain regions outside of formal federal judicial oversight. (One can track annual global and regional trends by reviewing the full reports on the OHCHR Press Releases.)

Singapore also executed 17 individuals in 2025. This is the highest annual number of executions in the country since 2003. Of this total, 15 executions were for drug-related offenses, while the remaining cases involved murder. Kuwait carried out a total of 18 executions in 2025, which represents a significant increase compared to the 6 executions recorded in 2024.

At least 15 executions were documented in Egypt in 2025 across 10 different cases. Since Egyptian authorities do not publish official death penalty statistics, human rights organizations emphasize that these figures represent only the minimum number of executions that researchers were able to verify through families and media reports independently. Notably, Japan carried out one execution in 2025. This single execution—that of Takahiro Shiraishi (the “Twitter killer”)—took place on June 27, 2025. It ended a nearly three-year hiatus on capital punishment in the country. 

South Sudan, Afghanistan, Oman, and Bangladesh also regularly appear on the annual list of executing nations.

Syria

Like China, Syria – a regular, frequent offender –  also maintained no official or exact total number of judicial executions or extrajudicial killings in 2025. This is primarily due to the severe lack of independent monitoring, the highly fragmented control of the country, and the fact that most killings occurred outside of formal legal systems. Human rights organizations and the United Nations documented thousands of summary executions and sectarian-motivated killings throughout the year.

Notable localized incidents did unquestionably occur, however. Following insurgent attacks on government forces in early March 2025, coordinated counteroffensives by government-affiliated armed groups resulted in the execution of an estimated 1,400 to 1,500 people, primarily targeting the Alawite minority. Investigations by organizations like Human Rights Watch geolocated instances of mass executions, including at least 32 men killed in a single incident in al-Mukhtariya, Latakia. During clashes in the southern Sweida governorate, Amnesty International documented the deliberate extrajudicial executions of at least 46 members of the Druze minority by government personnel and affiliated forces on July 15 and 16, 2025. Furthermore, in late January 2025, fighters affiliated with the transitional government carried out 35 summary executions, primarily targeting former Assad-era officers. Due to industrial-scale detentions spanning the past decade and ongoing conflict, tens of thousands of individuals have been forcibly disappeared or executed in prisons over the years. However, exact, corroborated statistics for 2025 state-sanctioned and extrajudicial deaths remain unavailable.

Where Israel Falls on this list of Shame

It is impossible to know yet exactly where Israel will rank on this disgraceful list. One cannot be certain of just how many individuals Israel will put to death under the “Prosecution of Participants in the October 7 Massacre Events Law (5786–2026)” that recently passed in the Knesset. This law, combined with the racist, dangerous, vengeful, and unjust “Death Penalty for Terrorists” that the Knesset passed on March 30 of this year, inaugurates a new era of state-sponsored killings in Israel.  The latest law focuses on the roughly 300-400 detainees from Gaza suspected of involvement in the horrific October 7th, 2023, attacks and who remain in Israeli custody without charge or trial, amid a documented policy of systemic torture. All of these prisoners could now become eligible for execution.

This latest law establishes a special military tribunal to adjudicate these Palestinians prisoners. It achieves this through a process that strips suspects of basic procedural protections essential to a fair trial and empowers the tribunal to impose the death penalty.  This law places Israel in direct opposition to the international trend toward abolition and to binding obligations under international humanitarian law, including the prohibition of cruel, inhuman, and degrading punishment. Furthermore, this legislation strips suspects of basic procedural protections essential to a fair trial, rendering any death sentence imposed an arbitrary deprivation of life, absolutely prohibited under international law and potentially a war crime. The law also targets a specific, identifiable category of suspects, a form of personal legislation prohibited under both Israeli constitutional principles and international law.

If these laws were not monstrous enough, yesterday, the military commander of the occupied West Bank made it even worse with an order creating a more expansive application of the law, including against those convicted of killing to negate the authority of the military commander – in other words, resisting occupation.

The Death Penalty Places Israel on the Wrong Side of History

Any nation that engages in the blatant human rights violation that is capital punishment inherently fails the litmus test for a civilized society. Any version of capital punishment – whether in secret in China, for all to celebrate in Iran or Gaza, behind a sterilized needle in the USA, or now to further the “deterrence delusion” in Israel – is an abject abomination. The thousands of members of “L’chaim! Jews Against the Death Penalty” have outlined time and again the multiple reasons for this well-deserved designation. First and foremost, rather than deterring acts of terrorism, the death penalty would instead incite and invite more shaheeds– martyrs – to attack Israel. The death penalty also violates the human right of life, always constitutes torture, risks executing the innocent, is racist in its application, and – from Adolph Hitler to Trump to National Security Minister Ben-Gvir – is used as a political tool, particularly for election campaigns. L’chaim has also illustrated how Jewish tradition makes the death penalty virtually impossible, and how many execution methods are direct Nazi legacies, including firing squad, gassing, and lethal injection.

Now that the Knesset has enacted these medieval laws and the unconscionable stain of executions will succeed in darkening what remains of the moral fabric of Israeli society, antisemitic extremists will assuredly blame all Jews for their state’s sponsored murder program, neatly fitting it into their warped view of Israel  – and, by extension, Judaism  – as a so-called  “Death Cult.” Just as these laws jeopardize the safety and security of Jews across the globe in this way, they also threaten to permanently mar what remains of Israel’s moral standing among the vast majority of nations that have abolished the death penalty in law and practice. In the highly volatile political climate that now imperils the rule of law in Israel, this issue further normalizes the invocation of state violence. It widens the gap between modern-day Israel and the central Jewish value of the inviolability of life.

Famed death penalty abolitionist Elie Wiesel best articulated L’chaim’s stance when he said of capital punishment that – in the shadow of the Holocaust – “death should never be the answer in a civilized society.” Proponents of these new laws in Israel should heed Wiesel’s message and realize that executions – still – are not the answer today, and never should be.

Cantor Michael J. Zoosman, MSM, BCC

Co-Founder: L’chaim! Jews Against the Death Penalty

Advisory Committee Member: Death Penalty Action