Prisoners' society says Israel has begun building a death-row wing with an execution room

The Palestinian Prisoners' Society said on Wednesday that Israeli authorities have started work on a prison wing set aside for Palestinians under sentence of death, and that the plans for it include a room in which the sentences would be carried out. It asked governments abroad to intervene before the wing is finished.

And its chairman, Abdullah al-Zaghari, said the step moves the death penalty out of speeches and statutes and into physical preparation. He called the work a crime against humanity and placed it within a wider campaign against the rights and the lives of prisoners.

The wing rests on a law the Knesset passed in March that allows military courts to sentence Palestinians convicted of killing Israelis to death. Al-Zaghari said the law makes that sentence mandatory, and leaves a court free to reduce it to life imprisonment only where it identifies exceptional circumstances.

Israeli media reported on Tuesday that work was under way on the first such wing and that it would contain a facility for executions, attributing the account to the office of Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister. Ben-Gvir filmed himself at the site and said the wing and the execution facility were beginning to take shape.

What separates a death penalty law from an execution is administration: somewhere to hold the condemned, and somewhere to carry the sentence out. Building both is the part a statute cannot do on its own, which is why the society treats the construction site as the more serious development of the two. No completion date has been given, and what is known of the wing comes from the minister's own office and from the video he recorded there rather than from the prison service.

More than 9,400 Palestinians are held in Israeli prisons, among them 92 women and more than 370 children, according to Palestinian and Israeli rights organisations, which describe conditions of torture, hunger and withheld medical care. Al-Zaghari said more than 100 prisoners have died in custody from beatings, violence, malnutrition and disease, and that the quiet of other states is what has allowed each further measure to proceed.

He called on governments, international institutions and human rights bodies to act before the wing is put to use.