“They don’t want to die,” says Minister Ben Gvir to me, standing inside Israel’s Damon Prison yesterday. I joined National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir’s inspection of Damon Prison on August 19, 2026, and was granted full, exclusive access to film, including inside the cell blocks housing some of Israel’s most dangerous female terrorists. The facility is the only one in the country holding such female prisoners convicted of heinous crimes against Israeli civilians. Inside one of the cells, a prisoner was asked by National Security Minister Ben Gvir to identify her organizational affiliation, answered directly: she belongs to the ‘Palestinian’ Islamic Jihad terror group.
2+During the prison inspection, speaking to the guards, Ben Gvir described what had happened when guards entered the cell of one female Arab terrorist convicted of luring a fifteen-year-old boy to Ramallah and murdering him: she mocked the boy’s final moments before his death, crying out for his parents.
Ben Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit party recently championed the death penalty for terrorists law. When I asked him about the new law, Ben Gvir responded, “Today, we understand that the death penalty for terrorists is also a deterrent. The terrorists say this in a very detailed way. They say we are afraid to go to prison, we are afraid of the death penalty. It works, and that’s the way it should be in a normal country. Terror should be afraid.”
The minister’s visit included meetings with prison staff and a briefing from the Israel Prison Service and its commanders on prison conditions, and how prisoners are treated at the facility. When asked whether he was satisfied with what he heard, Ben Gvir did not hesitate.
2+“I am very, very satisfied with what I heard,” he said. “They complained, as you heard, those female terrorists, that it’s not good for them, that they’re suffering.” One of the female prisoners described the conditions in Arabic. A prison translator rendered her answer: “Very difficult. Very difficult conditions.”
Asked when the death penalty would actually be implemented, the minister pointed to the legislation already on the books. “We already passed this law,” he said. “Thank G-d, until today, there have been no circumstances that justify this penalty.”
Tupolev asked about whether the death penalty can truly deter a culture that glorifies death, to which Ben Gvir responded: “I used to think exactly like that,” he admitted. “‘Wait, they want to die, all of them, so what does it matter?’ But this is incorrect.”
2+The minister traced that shift back to a visit to the same facility two years earlier. “I heard one of the female terrorists say, ‘I don’t have my perfume, I need my perfume,'” he recalled. “That’s when you understand, and you see the data, that most of them don’t want to die. Most of them planned to be in an Israeli hotel. Most of them planned that Israeli jails are easy, and would make life easy. Now they are very surprised that that’s not happening.”
Ben Gvir concluded with a disclosure that he survived multiple assassination attempts in recent years: “They tried to murder me in the last years, ten times. Ten times,” he said. “Do you know why? Because they know that I am tough on them.”