Reinstating the Death Penalty in Israel: A Halachic and Moral Imperative

By Rabbi Yair Hoffman

PLEASE NOTE: This article advocates implementing the death penalty for future terrorist acts to eliminate the incentive for hostage-taking. It is not an argument against the current hostage exchange—bringing our captives home is a sacred obligation. It argues that, going forward, Israel must shatter the cycle that has made kidnapping profitable for Hamas by ensuring that future terrorists cannot be traded.

Rav Yeruchem Levovitz zatzal, the great Mashgiach of the Mir Yeshiva in Poland, once observed (Daas Torah Shemos, p. 201) that a person sleeps at night only because law deters the violent; take away deterrence and people will “swallow each other alive.”

In a few days, in the predawn hours, buses will roll into Ramallah. Inside: convicted murderers. Outside: cheering crowds.

On October 9, 2025, Israel approved a ceasefire that frees nearly two thousand prisoners, including roughly two hundred and fifty serving life sentences.

Read their names slowly. Let them sink in.

The Ramallah lynchers, who dragged two reservists to their deaths while a mob member waved hands dripping with Jewish blood from a window. Baher Dar—eleven life terms for bombings including Tzrifin. Ibrahim Alikem—murdered Ita Tzur and her twelve-year-old son Efrayim. The killer of Dalia Lemkus. Iyem Kammamji—kidnapped and murdered Eliyahu Asheri, later escaped Gilboa Prison. Hussein Jawadrah—murdered soldier Eden Attias. The Neve Yaakov murderer who killed policewoman Galit Arviv. Handlers of the Carmel Market suicide bomber. A senior Islamic Jihad commander from Jenin. Multiple recidivists from the Shalit deal—freed once, re-arrested after returning to terror, now freed again.

And beyond the battlefield atrocities: a rapist-murderer of a Jewish woman. A killer who murdered his sister. A man who murdered his mother for marrying a Jew. Palestinians who carried out mass murder on a Jerusalem bus line.

They are not aberrations. They are a parade.

None of this is novel. It is a script we’ve performed before. Since Oslo, Israel has released more than ten thousand terrorists. Let;s read that number again: More than 10,000 rachmana litzlan. 

The Shalit deal alone freed 1,027 prisoners. Among them: Yahya Sinwar yimach shmo, a psychopath who ascended to lead Hamas and helped orchestrate October 7, 2023.

Hamas learned simple arithmetic: kill and kidnap, then watch Israel empty its prisons. If we are serious about ending that economy, we must end the inventory.

A dead terrorist cannot be traded.

The Dawn of Evil

Remember how we arrived here. Simchas Torah morning, October 7, 2023. Thousands of rockets blanketed the sky. Nukhba commandos breached the border at more than a hundred points. What followed was pure evil.

Families burned alive in Be’eri. Parents executed in front of their children. Young people hunted like animals across the fields of the Nova festival. Women dragged away and degraded on video by men so proud of their crimes that they posted them online. At Nahal Oz, seven young female soldiers captured alive, their terror filmed, some later murdered in captivity. By nightfall, roughly 1,200 Jews were dead. More than 240 dragged into tunnels.

The killers called parents to boast. They live-streamed final moments to family phones. They sought not simply to murder but to traumatize a nation, to harvest souls for today’s exchange.

Today’s “ceasefire” is the predictable harvest of seeds planted in blood.

The Torah Speaks First

To those who claim “Jewish tradition rejects the death penalty,” open your eyes. The Torah’s voice is clear and early.

Bereishis 9:6: “Whoever sheds man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed”—the first law given to all mankind after the Flood, the foundation of civilization itself. Life is sacred precisely because it carries accountability.

Shemos 21:12: “One who strikes a man and he dies shall surely be put to death.”

Vayikra 24:17: He who kills shall surely die.

Devarim 17:6 establishes the evidentiary bar: capital punishment requires two or three witnesses testifying together.

The Torah does not abolish capital punishment. It enshrines it—then surrounds it with the strictest safeguards so that justice defends the innocent while holding murderers to account.

The Tension and Its Resolution

The Mishnah in Makkos 1:10 frames the tension with brutal frankness. A Sanhedrin that executes once in seven years is called destructive. Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah says even once in seventy years. Rabbi Tarfon and Rabbi Akiva declare that had they sat on the Sanhedrin, no one would ever have been executed.

Then Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel speaks the sentence in Yavneh that feels written for our age, for right now, and in Eretz Yisroel again:

If so, murderers will multiply in Israel.

The halachic tradition holds the line between fear of error and fear of anarchy.

The Rambam (Hilchos Sanhedrin 14:4) rules that even when formal Sanhedrin procedures cannot function—no Temple, no complete procedural framework—the king or court may execute “le-migdar milsa,” to erect a fence that preserves order. Civil authority bears responsibility to protect society, including with capital punishment where necessary.

The Gemara in Bava Metzia 83b–84a gives us flesh and blood, not abstractions. R’ Elazar ben R’ Shimon and R’ Yishmael ben R’ Yosi served as law-enforcement officials under a non-Jewish government, identifying criminals—even Jews—to be punished by the state, at times by death. When R’ Yehoshua ben Karcha rebuked R’ Elazar as “vinegar son of wine,” the charge was not halachic violation—it was falling short of a supererogatory ideal of chassidus.

The Ritva explains: as agents of the king, they operated under dina demalchusa, which may punish—including by death—without Sanhedrin procedures, for the sake of maintaining order in the world. The Torah recognizes that civil government has jurisdiction and duty to punish evildoers to protect society.

Answering the Central Objection

Here we confront directly an argument often voiced even by Poskim in Israel (including a chief Rabbi): if we authorize the state to execute, we risk non-halachic executions of innocent Jews not convicted al pi halacha.

The Rashba demolishes this objection with force and clarity.

In Teshuvos HaChadashos MiKsav Yad §345, cited by the Beis Yosef in Choshen Mishpat 388, the Rashba recounts being summoned by the king to evaluate a Jewish informant—a moser. He and another sage examined the case and concluded the man was liable for death. The king executed him.

The Rashba then delivers the principle: The elaborate restrictions binding a Sanhedrin are gezeiras hakasuv—Torah-mandated procedures for Torah courts. Civil authority stands on different footing. Dina demalchusa depends on establishing truth by the state’s standards; it is not bound by the Sanhedrin’s technicalities of eidim and hasra’ah.

Listen to his conclusion: If you insist governments cannot punish unless they mimic Sanhedrin procedures, the world will become desolate because murderers will proliferate.

He cites R’ Elazar ben R’ Shimon and R’ Yishmael ben R’ Yosi to prove their work with the sovereign was not crime but, at most, a departure from the loftiest chassidus. Their critics did not call them sinners. Only “vinegar son of wine.”

The Rashba answers the Israeli objection head-on: Empowering the state to execute does not create halachic travesty—it fulfills halacha’s mandate for civil order. The fear of wrongful execution must be addressed through due process and evidentiary rigor, as every just legal system must. But halacha does not forbid the state from punishing by death simply because its procedures differ from Sanhedrin. On the contrary, halacha recognizes civil punishment as necessary to prevent the very desolation objectors fear.

The Chasam Sofer in Shu”t VI (Likutim) §14 is often cited for caution: he is reluctant to empower non-Torah systems over Jews. But even there, where public safety requires it and evil threatens to spread, he acknowledges the need to punish. The Maharam Schick, as summarized in Meoros Nasan §61, clarifies that while Gedolei Yisroel may prefer not to involve themselves directly out of chassidus, the civil authority retains full halachic license under dina demalchusa to execute those guilty of murder, for the stability and protection of society.

In our context: the State of Israel, as a sovereign polity, can institute and apply a death penalty for terrorist murder in a halachically recognized framework.

Rav Moshe Feinstein zt”l, in Igros Moshe Choshen Mishpat II:68 (a 1981 letter to Governor Hugh Carey), sharpens the point for times like ours. He distinguishes between ultra-exacting Sanhedrin standards and the state’s obligation to deter when murder proliferates and the prohibition has become meaningless to perpetrators. When murderers multiply, he writes, we apply capital punishment to deter, “for to do so is saving society.”

Even Rav Aharon Soloveitchik zt”l, in a letter to Dr. David Luchins, who argued that without Beis HaMikdash and Sanhedrin the halachic death penalty should not be administered by a Torah court, does not contradict the Rashba, Ritva, or Rambam regarding civil authority. Even champions of maximal chassidus concede the halachic standing of civil enforcement where society’s preservation is at stake.

What Does It Actually Achieve?

First, incapacitation. A dead terrorist will never orchestrate another bus bombing, take another hostage, or return in another lopsided deal to plan a worse atrocity. An imprisoned terrorist can escape, direct operations from behind bars, or be traded. We’ve seen it happen.

Second, elimination of exchange value. Dead terrorists cannot be bartered. That collapses the business model Hamas perfected from the 1990s through Shalit to today: take as many hostages as possible to force mass releases.

Third, deterrence of rational actors. Not everyone in a terror infrastructure is a zealot courting death. Many are opportunists weighing risk against reward. Change the outcome from “life now, parade later” to “swift execution after due process,” and you shrink recruitment for hostage-harvesting operations. No policy stops every attack driven by ideological hatred. But a death penalty directly undermines the logic of large-scale kidnapping operations designed to open Israel’s prisons.

That alone could prevent another October 7th rachmana litzlan.

Breaking the Cycle

This is not an argument against the current exchange. Bring our people home. Few responsibilities are as crushing as deciding between the lives of hostages and the lives of future victims. But honesty obliges us to say: today’s exchange is not a solution. It is a symptom of policy failure.

If we do not change the policy, the symptom will re-occur. Again and again r”l.

Going forward, from the day such a law is enacted, anyone who murders civilians in a terrorist act, takes civilians hostage, or plans, funds, or operationally enables such acts should face the death penalty – a practical death penalty. Administered after exacting due process: converging forensic and digital evidence, courtroom scrutiny, maximum judicial review on a defined timeline, and a swift post-judgment window so that the penalty deters rather than decays into decades of appeals.

The World Is Watching—So What?

Israel has internalized the judgments of a world that calls terrorists “freedom fighters” and victims “oppressors.” That world will never grant us the moral permission slip we seek.

Our compass is not the applause of the United Nations. It is the Torah of life, which commands that we eradicate evil from our midst so the innocent can live.

When R’ Elazar ben R’ Shimon said, “I am clearing the vineyard of its thorns,” he captured the painful duty of a people determined to live: remove what destroys life, not because we relish death, but because we choose life.

Israel is the vineyard. The Jewish people are the fruit. The terrorists are the thorns.

The Choice Before Us

Yes, rescue the hostages now. Let us daven for their safe return. We need to comfort their families.

But end the cycle that seeded this nightmare.

The burning question is the next October 7. Will we allow this to happen again, telling ourselves we had no choice? Or will we finally implement the Torah’s solution—executing terrorist murderers swiftly, removing the incentive to kidnap, ensuring there are no prisoners to trade?

To refuse to execute mass murderers in the name of counterfeit compassion is not mercy. It is a promise of more widows. More orphans. More body bags.

The halachic tradition is not pacifism. It is ordered justice—mercy within boundaries, compassion that does not betray the innocent. The Rashba has already answered the central objection: empowering the state to punish by death does not violate halacha’s capital procedures, because those procedures bind the Sanhedrin, not the sovereign’s essential duty to preserve society.

He anticipated the cost of ignoring this: If you deny governments that power, the world will become desolate, because murderers will proliferate.

We are there now.

The Torah’s vision—divine, disciplined, compassionate—demands that we protect life through accountability. Reinstating the death penalty for terrorist murder is not cruelty. It is the only policy that removes the incentive to kidnap, breaks the exchange economy, and ends the revolving door that turns “life” into “until the next deal.”

“You shall destroy the evil from your midst, and all Israel shall hear and fear” is not a slogan. It is a charge to build a society where Jewish mothers can sleep, where Jewish children do not fear that the man freed yesterday will be the murderer of tomorrow, and where the world finally understands that Jewish blood is not a bargaining chip.

Rabbi Yair Hoffman can be reached at [email protected].  He has authored over over 3000 halachic articles and over fifty halachic Seforim and  with Haskamos from leading gedolim past and present, including Rav Dovid Kviat zt”l, Rav Yisroel Belsky zt”l, Rav Chaim Pinchas Scheinberg zt”l, Rav Shmuel Kamenetsky, Rav Malkiel Kotler, Rav Avrohom Grossman, Rav Dovid Cohen, Rav Reuvain Feinstein, and many others. Many of his Seforim are available at https://www.amazon.com/s?k=rabbi+yair+hoffman&page=4&crid=1M39P4S4K3WWT&qid=1760087870&sprefix=rabbi+yair+hoffman%2Caps%2C105&xpid=pOzkN9T69OEkp&ref=sr_pg_3