On Sunday, thousands of Moroccans gathered in Rabat to express their solidarity with the Palestinian people and to protest against a recent Israeli law that imposes the death penalty on residents of the West Bank convicted of committing deadly terrorist acts. Journalists from AFP observed that the crowd paraded along Mohammed V Avenue in the heart of the capital, proudly waving Palestinian and Moroccan flags.
According to reports from AFP, the number of demonstrators exceeded 5,000, although no official figures were released by the authorities. The protesters chanted slogans such as "No to the death penalty," "No to occupation and Zionism," and "Gaza is starving," responding to a call from the National Action Group for Palestine, which includes Islamists, notably the Justice and Development Party (PJD), alongside leftist activists.
Among the demonstrators was 26-year-old Najoua Ouahbi, who told AFP, "I am protesting today against the alarming situation in Gaza and the targeting of civilians." Aziz El Hannaoui, a member of the organizing coalition, emphasized, "We support the Palestinian prisoners who are threatened by this new death penalty law." Under this Israeli legislation, anyone who intentionally causes the death of another person with the intent of harming an Israeli citizen or resident, and with the aim of undermining the existence of the State of Israel, faces either the death penalty or life imprisonment.
For Palestinians in the West Bank, the law stipulates that the death penalty will be the default punishment if the homicide is classified as an act of terrorism by the Israeli military courts. Although the death penalty is already part of Israeli law, it has only been executed twice: once in 1962 against Adolf Eichmann, a key orchestrator of the Holocaust's "Final Solution," and again against Meir Tobianski in 1948, who was posthumously exonerated. Until now, Israeli courts could only impose the death penalty under extremely limited circumstances and required a unanimous decision from a panel of judges—a threshold that has never been met in terrorism cases.
In Rabat, demonstrators once again voiced their rejection of Morocco's normalization of relations with Israel, which was formalized at the end of 2020 as part of the Abraham Accords. Large-scale anti-Israel protests have erupted in Morocco since the onset of conflict involving the Hamas terrorist group in Gaza, which began on October 7, 2023, following a brutal attack carried out by Hamas on that same day.
As reported by fr.timesofisrael.com.
