In Solidarity | On Palestinian Prisoners’ Day
April 17, 2026
On Palestinian Prisoners’ Day, we stand in solidarity with the Palestinian political prisoners and uplift their ongoing struggle and right to resist occupation. According to Addameer, a Palestinian prisoner support organization, nearly 10,000 Palestinians are confined in Israeli prisons. This total includes over 300 children as well as more than 3,000 people detained under administrative detention or incarceration without trial or charge. Conditions in Israeli prisons are so harsh that the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories has described them as a “network of torture camps.”
We condemn in the strongest terms the conditions Israel is holding Palestinians in.
On March 30, 2026, the Israeli Knesset passed the Penal Bill (Amendment―Death Penalty for Terrorists). This discriminatory law condemns Palestinians convicted of acts of violence in resistance to the illegal occupation of their land to death by hanging. Reactions from the international community were swift. United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Alice Jill Edwards said, “The selective application of capital punishment on ethnic or national grounds, or because of one’s political views, constitutes a particularly stark form of discriminatory harm. Any system that permits differential treatment in their justice system or by the imposition of the death penalty undermines the most basic guarantees of equality before the law.”
We condemn in the strongest terms this racist, discriminatory law.
The day the law passed, the world bore witness to Israeli politicians wearing “hangman nooses” on their lapels, celebrating in the Knesset. The symbolism was as clear as it was eerie, chilling, and ironic. The nooses serve as homage to the racist lynch mobs led by the KKK that terrorized Black communities in the American South. The treatment of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories is often and rightly compared to Apartheid South Africa. The symbolism of lynching however, reminds us that the Nuremberg Laws – the notorious anti-Jewish legislation of the Nazi race regime – were modeled after America’s own racist laws during the Jim Crow era. It is hard to imagine a greater irony and reminder that oppression knows no bounds.
While the outrage about this law was swift, notably, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, a staunch opponent of the death penalty, hasn’t spoken out against this particularly chilling application of the death penalty through a racist law. His silence is itself an example of the rampant bias that continues to deny Palestinians their humanity.
It is this denial that has propelled the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people. In this latest escalation, the adoption of a law imposing the death penalty exclusively on one race or ethnicity is yet another textbook example of genocide, racial/ethic intimidation, and a fundamental violation of Universal Human Rights.
We condemn the occupation of Palestinian lands, the subjugation of the Palestinian people, and the ongoing genocide.
We reaffirm the Palestinian people’s right to resist occupation under the United Nations General Assembly resolutions 34/44 (1979) and 37/43 (1982) on the legitimacy of peoples’ struggle for liberation from colonial/alien domination and foreign occupation “by all available means, including armed struggle”. These resolutions are rooted in the principles of self-determination, humanity, and the insatiable desire to live free and safe.
Power to the Resistance. May we all live free.
Robert Saleem Holbrook
Executive Director
Abolitionist Law Center