Most of you know I was kidnapped a few months ago and dumped in K’ziot prison in Israel. This article by human rights advocate Miral Askar chills me to the bone. It shows how broken the prison system is and how broken and messed Israelis are: “The Israeli Prison Service has begun preparing an execution plan, following the approval of a death penalty law that feels like it belongs to a different century. The Prison Service is already moving ahead with the logistics. They’re setting up a dedicated execution complex (!!) and have settled on hanging as the method. To keep the guards from feeling the psychological weight of what they’re doing, they’ve designed a system where three people press buttons at the same time—making it impossible to know who actually triggered the floor. They are even looking for "specialized volunteers" to form these teams. There is something so deeply broken about a society that recruits volunteers to hang people. A delegation is even expected to travel to an East Asian country to study their administrative and legal mechanisms for execution. They are turning the prison system into a place where ending a life is just another administrative task to be refined. While most legal systems involve years of appeals, these executions are set to happen within 90 days of a verdict. The plan is to start with "elite" prisoners from the October 7 events and then expand the law to Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. Those held in the execution complex will be kept in complete isolation, severed from any human contact before their time is up. The bill is written so broadly that it allows for the death penalty even in cases where a death wasn't intentional, but is interpreted as being motivated by "hostility" toward Israelis. In practice, this framework only applies to Palestinians. It ignores the dual legal structure where settlers fall under civilian law while Palestinians are prosecuted in military courts with a 99% conviction rate. This double standard is even more disturbing given the recent surge in settler violence, with over 1,300 attacks recorded in the last year alone. We already know this settler terrorism is almost never charged, creating a system where one group is granted total impunity while the other is being prepared for the gallows. What is most terrifying is who this will actually kill. We already know that thousands of Palestinians are held in "administrative detention"—meaning they are in prison indefinitely with no charges, no trial, and no conviction. As of late 2024, there were over 3,300 Palestinians held this way. When you combine a system that already imprisons people without evidence with a law that allows for rapid executions, you are looking at a system that is prepared to execute innocent people. UN experts have warned that this is a violation of the most basic right to life. But when a system has already decided a group of people aren’t fully human, the law just becomes a way to organize the violence.”