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death penalty
'This Isn't Justice': Trump to Bring Back Firing Squad, Electric Chair, and Gas Executions
"Expanding the federal death penalty will be a stain on our history," said Sen. Dick Durbin.
Apr 24, 2026
The US Department of Justice said on Friday that it was planning to bring back several long-abandoned methods of execution—including firing squads, gas asphyxiation, and electrocution—as part of President Donald Trump's effort to expand the use of the federal death penalty.
Trump has vowed to restore the death penalty at the federal level, reversing the moratorium imposed by former President Joe Biden, who downgraded the sentences of nearly all 40 people on death row to life in prison without parole.
"The prior administration failed in its duty to protect the American people by refusing to pursue and carry out the ultimate punishment against the most dangerous criminals, including terrorists, child murderers, and cop killers," said acting Attorney General Todd Blanche on Friday. "Under President Trump's leadership, the Department of Justice is once again enforcing the law and standing with victims."
The federal government has never in modern history used the firing squad as a method of execution. And with the exception of Utah and South Carolina—the latter of which only revived the practice in 2025—it has not been used in state executions in the modern era.
The chair, which was the most common method of execution in the 20th century, was gradually phased out beginning in the 1980s because it came to be widely viewed as violent and cruel.
Meanwhile, execution by poison gas was carried on in the US for decades after the Nazis used it to murder millions of victims during the Holocaust, with states mostly abandoning it because it was viewed as expensive and impractical. However, Alabama and Louisiana have recently brought it back using nitrogen gas.
Nearly all executions at the state level are now carried out with lethal injections, which, despite being considered more "humane," are known to cause intense pain and suffocation and are frequently botched.
Blanche, who has authorized the government to seek the death penalty against nine people, said reviving old methods is necessary to ensure that the department "is prepared to carry out lawful executions even if a specific drug is unavailable."
According to data from the Death Penalty Information Center, nearly 1 in 8 people convicted and sentenced to death have later been exonerated. Meanwhile, more than 550 capital convictions, over 5% of them, have been overturned due to prosecutorial misconduct.
Efforts to revive antiquated methods are likely to draw challenges from civil rights groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, which have called the death penalty a form of "cruel and unusual punishment" forbidden by the US Constitution and one that disproportionately harms people of color.
"This isn’t justice. It’s cruel, immoral, and discriminatory," said Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.). "Expanding the federal death penalty will be a stain on our history."
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The American Medical Association Is Failing to Speak Up for Dr. Abu Safiya
If they speak out to save just one Palestinian doctor's life, they could pave the way to save hundreds of other prisoners.
Apr 10, 2026
Israel tortured a 1-year-old baby. They burned him with cigarettes and drove nails through his feet as a form of torture during his father's interrogation. This isn't some twisted, made-up movie scene; this is real life. And it's the one case we know of right now, but who knows how many other babies, in all their innocence, have been tortured by the Israeli military? It also begs the question: Since they're willing to do this to an infant, what are they doing to older prisoners?
It's always been clear that the Zionist settler colony will go to any length to achieve its goal of being an ethnostate. To achieve this goal, it subjects Palestinians to mass-imprisonment campaigns. No title—child, teenager, mother, father, health professional, aid worker—is spared from the Israeli prison system. Because if Israel can't just outright exterminate all Palestinians at once, the next best option is to round them up and slowly kill them behind bars.
Well, that was the case before March 30, 2026, when the Israeli Knesset passed a bill that calls for the hanging of Palestinian prisoners within 90 days of being convicted of killing Israeli settlers. The bill was introduced by Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has been wearing noose pins and carrying around a physical noose to publicly show his excitement for potentially becoming Israel's official executioner. When the vote was called out and the bill was passed, Ben-Gvir popped champagne bottles with his cronies, celebrating the essence of killing more Palestinians.
These are illegal settlers under international law, who have been terrorizing Palestinian villagers for years, their attacks becoming increasingly frequent and heinous. Palestinians have had their houses set on fire while inside them at the hands of these settlers, backed by the state. It is important to remember that the Israeli military courts operate outside of constitutional processes and have been widely condemned for their human rights abuses. In these courts, Palestinians have a conviction rate of over 96%, most often for crimes they never even committed.
Our government is killing people in cold blood, and the institutions meant to advocate for us remain silent even when it is their peers being forced into tanks, handcuffed, and locked away and tortured.
Israel promotes its interests by incentivizing settlers to brutalize Palestinians and destroy their land. And now, after systematically denying Palestinians' right to defend themselves, they are branding them as cattle to be killed by hanging. Israel is carrying out its genocide in the form of codified law. This is the true face of the settler colonial state of Israel: dehumanization to the lowest level.
Right now, Israel is holding the highest number of Palestinian prisoners ever recorded. One such prisoner is Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya. He was the sole lead of the only functioning hospital in northern Gaza, Kamal Adwan Hospital. For the "crime" of providing medical aid to Palestinians, he was surrounded by Israeli tanks and soldiers and forced into imprisonment in December 2024.
Israeli society is getting more and more draconian: no prosecution, no unanimity, nothing. Simply put, if the Israeli military sees fit to kill a Palestinian prisoner, they will do so. Dr. Abu Safiya has been in an Israeli prison for 16 months, and there is speculation that he is being tortured. But again, if they can torture an infant, what's a middle-aged man to them? The new Israeli bill gives the IOF a pathway to execute prisoners like Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya: torturing them to force a confession, convicting them, and then hanging them. Clearly, he's been deemed a threat to the very existence of Israel because he helped save the lives of Palestinians.
This is the situation of medical professionals outside of the West, heroes who put everything on the line to provide care for their people. In comparison to the most "esteemed" doctors in the US—like those within the American Medical Association, with all their prestige and shiny titles—the healthcare workers subjected to deadly imperialist brutality deserve our recognition, and they urgently need our help.
You might be thinking, "What does the American Medical Association have to do with a detained Palestinian doctor?" Firstly, we need to contend with the fact that it is our US tax dollars that fund these genocidal soldiers, prisons, and policies that got Dr. Abu Safiya arrested in the first place. The American government and its institutions are just as guilty of the oppression of the Palestinian as the Israelis are. We need to stop operating on willful ignorance because it has cost thousands of lives in the region, a tally that is increasing by the second with the recent attacks on Iran and Lebanon.
Secondly, the American Medical Association (AMA) prides itself on its strong relationship with the World Medical Association, which has already called for the release of Dr. Abu Safiya, demonstrating alignment with its policies that "support the rights of physicians worldwide." The advocacy of foreign doctors is integral to the AMA as a whole. Why is a Palestinian doctor being ignored by them, then? Maybe the topic of genocide is too taboo for them. That would be ironic if so, when a genocide is the culmination of healthcare sectors being destroyed, lineages lost, and eugenics shaping a land and people forever. These are topics any medical association should be speaking about, especially one that represents the literal country that enabled this violence. Imagine the leverage the AMA could have in the halls of Congress when advocating for change.
The recent codification of the execution of Palestinian prisoners poses a grave threat to Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya's life. Will the AMA finally act now, in the face of such injustice and wickedness? If they speak out to save just one doctor's life, they could pave the way to save hundreds of other prisoners.
The genocide in Gaza has shown me that so much of what I thought about society was false. I once believed I lived in a world where good prevails, but I have come to realize that selective empathy is the rule. The leaders of this world don't hold empathy for anything or anyone that stands in their way of global domination. I frequently think of how many lives have been lost at the hands of US-Israeli imperial violence. The sheer number of casualties in Gaza, despite being predicted to be in the hundreds of thousands, has never been enough reason to stop. I think of how one of the first targets in the US war on Iran was a girl's elementary school, which they targeted with not just one strike, but three in a row.
Our government is killing people in cold blood, and the institutions meant to advocate for us remain silent even when it is their peers being forced into tanks, handcuffed, and locked away and tortured. At this point, advocating for the release of our prisoners who were wrongfully detained is the least we can do.
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Rights Groups Demand EU Suspend Trade Deal With Israel Over 'Appalling' Death Penalty Law
A political group in the European Parliament and dozens of human rights groups have called for suspending the EU-Israel Association Agreement.
Apr 02, 2026
Global criticism has mounted since Israeli lawmakers approved a death penalty law targeting Palestinians earlier this week, including fresh calls for the European Union to suspend a key political and trade deal, the EU-Israel Association Agreement.
On Thursday, 31 groups, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Oxfam, said in a joint statement that "we are appalled by the Israeli Knesset's decision to approve a bill that makes death penalty effectively mandatory in the West Bank and which will de facto apply exclusively to Palestinians."
The coalition also specifically put pressure on the EU, noting that the bloc "has consistently held that capital punishment is cruel, inhuman, and incompatible with human dignity under all circumstances," and that the Israeli law violates "the right to life and protections enshrined in international humanitarian and human rights law, such as the Fourth Geneva Convention, the Hague Regulations, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the Convention Against Torture."
"Diplomatic engagement by the EU and its member states urging Israel to reverse course has so far proven ineffective. This appalling development occurs amid an ongoing manmade humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, which a UN Commission of Inquiry, multiple Palestinian, Israeli, and international organizations, and independent experts have characterized as constituting genocide, and against the backdrop of an accelerating de facto annexation of the West Bank," the coalition wrote, pointing to the July 2024 advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice. "The adoption of the death penalty law is thus part of a pattern of discriminatory policies and practices against Palestinians."
The coalition continued:
In furtherance of these policies, Israel has already crossed established EU red lines: the advancement of settlement construction in the E1 area, which breaks the territorial contiguity of the West Bank, with the intent to prevent a future Palestinian state; the ban on [the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East] and attacks on its facilities, including schools and clinics built and run with EU contributions; the expulsion of international NGOs through restrictive registration procedures; forced evictions of Palestinian residents in East Jerusalem; forced displacement of tens of thousands of Palestinians and widespread demolitions of Palestinian homes and infrastructure in the West Bank, including EU-funded projects; persistent impunity for abuses by Israeli security forces and state-backed settler violence; reports of widespread and systemic torture and mistreatment of Palestinian prisoners; restrictions on religious freedoms; attacks on journalists; and denial of access to EU officials.
As also recalled by the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs Kallas in her statement... the EU-Israel Association Agreement establishes respect for democratic principles as an essential element of EU-Israel relations. A review conducted by the EU in June 2025 based on Article 2 of the agreement found Israel in breach of its human rights obligations for serious abuses against Palestinians and violations of the laws of war, both in Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
When the bloc refused to halt the trade deal over Gaza last year, Amnesty International secretary general Agnès Callamard called the decision "a cruel and unlawful betrayal—of the European project and vision, predicated on upholding international law and fighting authoritarian practices, of the European Union's own rules, and of the human rights of Palestinians."
The coalition concluded Thursday: "Nine months on, the time for action is long overdue. The European Union must uphold its stated principles and legal obligations by finally suspending, as a minimum immediate measure, the trade component of the EU-Israel Association Agreement and adopting other measures."
One political group in the European Parliament, the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S&D Group), also expressed "deep concern following the Israeli Knesset's approval of legislation introducing the death penalty for Palestinians convicted of terrorism," and put pressure on the European Council, which is made up of the bloc's heads of state or government.
"The S&D Group is calling on the European Council to urgently suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement in light of Israel's continuous and grave violations of Article 2 of the Agreement on human rights, which is central to the partnership," the group said in a Tuesday statement, the day after the law passed.
Yannis Maniatis, S&D Group vice president for foreign affairs, said that "reintroducing the death penalty is a step back into the past and yet another blow to the values that underpin our partnership with Israel. We cannot and will not remain silent."
"When a partner repeatedly ignores the warnings from its friends and civil society alike, there must be consequences," added Maniatis, a Greek politician. "It is high time the Council suspended the EU-Israel Association Agreement. The time to act is now."
The S&D Group's statement came not only after the death penalty law's passage but also amid a European citizens' initiative collecting signatures to demand the suspension in response to Israel's "unprecedented level of killing and injury of civilians, a large-scale displacement of population, and the systematic destruction of hospitals and medical facilities" in the Gaza Strip. So far, over 645,000 people from EU member states, of the necessary 1 million, have signed on to that call.
The Council of the European Union—which is composed of national ministers from each member state—this week issued a statement reiterating the EU's "principled position against the death penalty in all cases and in all circumstances," condemning the Israeli law as "a grave regression," and highlighting deep concerns about its "de facto discriminatory character."
"Consistent with our global efforts towards universal abolition of the death penalty, the EU urges Israel to abide by its previous principled position and with its obligations under international law, as well as its commitment to democratic principles, as reflected also in the provisions of the EU-Israel Association Agreement," the council said.
However, there have been no signals from EU leadership about progress toward suspending the agreement in light of the law's passage.
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