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Israel's security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has published a video in which he appears to threaten to kill a senior Hamas figure held in Israeli custody, according to an Al Jazeera video report published on 28 September 2026. The clip shows Ben-Gvir speaking directly to the camera and making a statement about Hassan Salameh, a senior Hamas official who is serving multiple life sentences in an Israeli prison.
The footage was circulated through social media channels, and images and excerpts of the remarks spread online before being picked up by international news outlets. The video report itself did not reproduce a full transcript of the minister's words at the time of publication, meaning the precise wording of the threat — and the conditions he attached to it — remain subject to the accounts of viewers and subsequent coverage. What is clear from the widely shared material is that Ben-Gvir, a far-right politician who has repeatedly used his official platform to make inflammatory statements about Palestinians, chose public video as the venue for a threat directed at a man in Israeli custody.
Salameh is one of the highest-profile figures in Israel's long-running system of pre-trial and post-trial detention of Palestinian prisoners. He has been held for decades, and for much of that period was not formally charged. His status changed dramatically in 2016, when he entered a plea arrangement and confessed to a range of offences, and he was subsequently convicted in Israeli court and handed a series of life sentences. The video report identifies his conviction as relating in particular to his role in a series of Hamas-orchestrated attacks carried out in 1996, among them bus bombings that killed and injured Israeli civilians in Jerusalem and elsewhere.
The attacks Salameh confessed to were part of one of the deadliest bursts of violence in Israeli-Palestinian history. In the spring of 1996, a coordinated wave of suicide bombings struck civilian buses and bus stops in Israeli cities, killing dozens of people and injuring scores of others. The campaign coincided with a wider escalation that also produced armed clashes in Gaza and the West Bank. Public prosecutor portrayals of that period described the bombings as deliberate attacks on crowded public transport, and the cases became a defining chapter in the long legal history of Hamas and Palestinian militant violence against Israeli civilians.
Salameh, widely identified over the years by the nom de guerre Abu Khaled al-Nayyab, was linked by Israeli authorities and prosecutors to Hamas's military wing and to the militant networks that operated in the occupied territories. He was captured in the 1990s and spent a substantial period of his detention without a trial, a fact that drew sustained criticism from human rights organisations and legal advocates who argued that indefinite detention without charge violated international law and basic standards of due process. Israel has maintained that security considerations justified the delay in prosecution.
His eventual convictions brought him into a category that is especially sensitive in Israeli and international debate: detainees serving exceptionally long sentences for attacks in which Israeli civilians died. Rights groups have repeatedly noted that the threat of execution or extra-judicial killing against such prisoners would place Israel outside the bounds of accepted legal norms, and that public declarations by a serving minister of state carry a particular weight because they can influence the treatment of detainees and the calculations of officials who report to him.
Legal scholars who examine such cases generally distinguish between rhetorical statements and legally actionable conduct, noting that a public threat made by a minister does not by itself alter the legal obligations of the state. At the same time, they point out that threats made on camera by a senior official are difficult to characterise as private remarks, and that they can be used in political proceedings or international forums to argue that official policy extends beyond lawful detention practices. Israel is a signatory to the 1949 Geneva Conventions, whose protections for prisoners are widely regarded as obligatory, and whose prohibition on summary execution has been treated as a core element of the post-Second World War order.
The timing of the video places it in a particularly charged political environment. The remarks come as the region absorbs the aftershocks of a prolonged Israeli-Palestinian war, with reporting in the same period documenting repeated Israeli violations of a Gaza ceasefire declared in November 2025, continuing Israeli strikes in southern Lebanon despite a ceasefire there, and mounting tensions with Iran, where Washington has been involved in a confrontation and Tehran has warned that it is fully prepared for war amid disruption concerns in the Strait of Hormuz. Against that backdrop, an inflammatory video from a minister with a known flair for provocation reads to many observers less as an isolated outburst than as a deliberate escalation of the rhetoric used to project strength.
Domestically, the clip lands in the middle of a coalition politics that has been defined by the influence of hardline ministers. Ben-Gvir's public persona — including past statements that have drawn condemnation from rights groups, and on occasion legal scrutiny at home — distinguishes him from more conventional security figures. Israeli politics has been consumed by debate over the status of hostages, the conduct of the war, and the shape of any post-war arrangement for Gaza and the West Bank, and rhetoric aimed at individual prisoners is used by some supporters of the minister to demonstrate resolve at a moment of intense scrutiny.
International response has followed a familiar pattern in such cases: Palestinian representatives and Hamas-linked media have framed the threat as evidence of what they describe as a policy of deliberate targeting of prisoners, while the family of Salameh, and prisoner-rights advocates, have called for the minister to be held accountable. European and international legal observers have, in parallel, reiterated that detainees must be treated in accordance with the Geneva Conventions regardless of the severity of the crimes for which they were convicted.
Whether the remarks translate into any change in Salameh's treatment is not yet established. Prison authorities operate under the supervision of the Israel Prison Service, and detainees' legal status is determined by the courts rather than by the declarations of individual politicians. But the circulation of the video has already achieved what such messages typically aim to achieve: it has placed the words of a serving minister at the centre of an international controversy, and it has put pressure on the Israeli government to explain what, if any, formal role the threat is meant to play.
For now, the video stands as the main published evidence in the story. Analysts caution that the full context — including any conditions Ben-Gvir may have attached, and any response from the Prime Minister's office, the Prison Service or prosecutors — will emerge only as further reporting becomes available. The visible claims remain narrow and stark: a senior official in the Israeli government has publicly called for the death of a jailed Hamas leader convicted over attacks that killed Israeli civilians, and the world is watching to see what follows.
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