Israeli minister fined over video showing him threaten Palestinian inmate
Israel's elections commission has fined National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir for a video he posted on X in which he threatened to "put to death" a Palestinian prisoner, arguing the footage was electoral propaganda.
Far-right minister Ben Gvir, who is hoping to become defense minister under the next government, frequently appears in videos confronting inmates in Israeli prisons. The latest footage features convicted Hamas official Hassan Salameh.
Israel's Central Elections Committee ruled on Thursday that Ben Gvir must delete the video and pay 10,000 shekels (around $3,250) each to two rights groups that had filed a petition against the footage.
According to the decision seen by AFP, the commission fined Ben Gvir not because of the content of the video but because it deemed he had violated election rules by campaigning for the October 27 vote by publishing the footage.
"The video is considered electoral propaganda" and it has been "established that public funds were used" to make it, the decision said.
The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI), one of the two rights groups that had lodged a complaint, welcomed the decision on Friday.
"We hope that the repeated rulings of the elections committee will deter the minister from further using prisons as though they were his private property, and humiliating prisoners as part of his election propaganda," PCATI legal director Merav Ben-Zeev said in a statement.
Ben Gvir published the video last month on X and has since deleted the post, but the footage is still available elsewhere online.
In the footage, the minister is seen in a prison cell confronting Salameh, a Palestinian prisoner sentenced to multiple life sentences for deadly attacks in Israel in 1996.
The video shows Salameh, frail and sporting a long beard, standing silently while Ben Gvir says, "I want to kill you. I want to put you to death."
In the caption, Ben Gvir wrote: "As national security minister, I led a policy that turned his life into hell. And with God's help, as defense minister, I will act to have murderous terrorists like him executed."
Ben Gvir is well-known for his inflammatory remarks and for posting videos of inmates.
He published one in August 2025 that showed him confronting the most high-profile Palestinian detainee in Israeli custody, Marwan Barghouti, in his prison cell.
In October of that year, he posted a video of himself standing over a row of Palestinian prisoners lying prone with their hands tied, in which he called for the "death penalty for terrorists".
Israel has since passed a death penalty law tailored to apply to Palestinians only, whose adoption Ben Gvir celebrated with a champagne toast.
Source: Agence France Presse
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