Capital Punishment in the Middle East: The Numbers

Last Updated: July 2026

Overview

Two Middle Eastern countries accounted for almost all of the world’s recorded executions in 2025. Amnesty International documented at least 2,707 executions globally, the highest figure since 1981 and a 78% rise on 2024, with Iran responsible for at least 2,159 and Saudi Arabia for at least 356. Together those two states made up 93% of the recorded global total.

The same region contains the first Arab country close to abolishing capital punishment entirely. Lebanese parliamentary committees approved a draft abolition law in July 2026, while Israel passed a law expanding the death penalty in March and Jordan resumed executions in June after nine years. This page describes the landscape and does not take a side. It is a maintained reference, revised as laws and circumstances change.

A note on the data. The figures above come from Amnesty International, an organisation that campaigns for abolition, and exclude China, where execution numbers are a state secret and are believed to be in the thousands. Amnesty’s regional counts are minimums built from confirmed cases, and Iranian human rights groups estimate that more than 90% of Iranian executions are never announced. Every number on this page is a floor, not a measurement.

The Competing Frames

Religious obligation and victims’ rights. In classical Islamic jurisprudence, murder falls under qisas, a category in which the right to demand execution belongs to the victim’s family rather than the state, and the family may pardon the killer or accept compensation instead. This makes the death penalty in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and elsewhere partly a private right that a government cannot simply abolish without addressing the underlying claim. Abolitionist scholars within the region argue that the same jurisprudence gives states wide discretion over discretionary offences and encourages pardon, and that the current scale of executions has no religious mandate.

Deterrence and public order. Governments defending high execution rates cite drug trafficking networks, armed insurgency, and organised crime. Saudi Arabia’s drug executions are presented domestically as protecting a young population from an addiction crisis. The empirical evidence for deterrence is weak and disputed worldwide, and the argument is rarely tested publicly in the countries applying it.

Human rights and abolition. The international abolition framework rests on the ICCPR’s Second Optional Protocol, repeated UN General Assembly moratorium resolutions, and the position that the penalty is irreversible in systems that make errors. Its regional weakness is the same one free speech arguments face: its most visible institutional backers are external, which allows the position to be framed as foreign pressure rather than domestic demand. Regional abolitionist movements exist, and Lebanon’s draft law is theirs.

Due process. A distinct critique that does not require opposing capital punishment in principle. It concerns confessions obtained under duress, closed trials, denial of counsel, executions of people convicted as minors, and specialised courts operating outside ordinary criminal procedure. This frame has more traction inside the region than pure abolitionism, because it can be argued without contesting the penalty itself.

Political use. Where courts sentence protesters, dissidents, and members of minority communities to death, the question shifts from criminal justice to political control. Governments involved describe these cases as terrorism prosecutions. Critics describe them as state killing of opponents. The two descriptions rarely apply to different sets of facts.

The Legal Spectrum

No country in the Middle East has abolished the death penalty for all crimes. The variation is in scope and use.

High-volume retentionist. Iran and Saudi Arabia execute at a scale unmatched anywhere outside China. Both apply the penalty to drug offences, which the UN Human Rights Committee holds falls outside the “most serious crimes” threshold permitted under the ICCPR, and both use courts created for security cases.

Regular retentionist. Iraq, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen all carried out executions in 2025. Iraq’s use is driven largely by anti-terrorism convictions and involves large death row populations awaiting ratification.

Retentionist with long pauses. Qatar, Oman, and Bahrain retain the penalty and use it rarely and irregularly. Jordan had not executed anyone since 2017 before hanging six men in June 2026. Lebanon’s last execution was in 2004.

Abolitionist in practice. Israel abolished capital punishment for ordinary crimes in 1954 and has executed one person since, in 1962, retaining it in theory for genocide and wartime treason. That position changed in 2026.

Scope of capital offences. Beyond murder, regional codes variously include drug trafficking, terrorism, armed robbery, rape, apostasy, blasphemy, adultery, same-sex conduct, and in Iran the broad categories of moharebeh (enmity against God) and efsad-e fel-arz (corruption on earth). The breadth of the last two is what allows political cases to be capital cases.

Law versus practice. Statutory scope and actual use diverge widely. Several states retain capital offences they never charge. Others execute for offences that carry discretionary sentences on paper. Reading a penal code will tell you little about a country’s execution rate.

The Regional Map

Iran. At least 2,159 executions in 2025 on Amnesty’s count, the highest since 1981 and more than double the 2024 figure. Iran Human Rights recorded at least 141 executions in the first two months of 2026. Drug offences account for a large share, and Amnesty has documented at least 36 people executed on politically motivated charges since the conflict with the United States and Israel began in early 2026. Baluch and Kurdish minorities are executed at rates far above their share of the population.

Saudi Arabia. At least 356 executions in 2025, a national record, following 345 in 2024. The kingdom carried out 96 executions between 1 January and 22 June 2026, 61 of them for drug offences. Foreign nationals are heavily represented among those executed for drug crimes, including citizens of Ethiopia, Pakistan, Sudan, Jordan, and Syria, a pattern raising questions about consular access and translation at trial.

Iraq. Iraq executes primarily under anti-terrorism legislation, with convictions frequently resting on confessions and Article 4 terrorism charges that cover association as well as acts. Death row numbers are large and ratification is a presidential function, which makes execution timing political.

The smaller Gulf states. Kuwait and the UAE both executed people in 2025, Kuwait including for drug offences. Qatar, Oman, and Bahrain use the penalty sparingly, and Bahrain’s cases have concentrated on security convictions from the post-2011 period, which international rights groups contest on due process grounds.

Israel and the Palestinian territories. The Knesset passed the Death Penalty for Terrorists Law on 30 March 2026 by 62 votes to 48, imposing a mandatory death sentence for certain killings. Human Rights Watch and Adalah argue the law’s drafting means it applies in practice to Palestinians, since it operates through the military court system in the occupied West Bank. No death sentence under it has been carried out as of mid-2026. The Palestinian Authority and Hamas have each issued death sentences under their own systems.

Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. Jordan resumed executions in June 2026. Lebanon has a long de facto moratorium and is now closer to formal abolition than any Arab state has been. Syria’s transitional authorities inherited a penal code containing capital offences and a legacy of executions carried out outside any judicial process, and have not yet legislated.

Recent Changes

The regional picture ten years ago pointed the other way. Iran’s 2017 amendment raising the quantity thresholds for capital drug offences cut executions sharply for several years. Saudi Arabia announced in 2020 that it would end discretionary death sentences for people convicted of crimes committed as minors, a change welcomed at the time.

Both reversed. Iranian executions rose steadily from 2021 and then jumped again after the 2022 protest movement, with drug cases returning to the centre of the count. Saudi executions fell to 27 in 2020 and then climbed every year afterwards to a record in 2025, driven mainly by drug convictions that had been under an informal pause.

The countervailing movement is real but small. Lebanon’s committee approval in July 2026 is the furthest an Arab state has come, and Penal Reform International and regional coalitions have built abolition arguments framed in domestic legal terms rather than international ones. Whether the Lebanese general assembly passes the bill is the test of whether that approach travels.

Active Debates

Lebanon’s abolition bill. Three parliamentary committees approved the draft on 9 July 2026. It needs the general assembly, and Lebanon’s parliament has a long record of approving things in committee that never reach a plenary vote. If passed it would be the first formal abolition in the Arab world.

Israel’s new law. Legal challenges to the March 2026 statute are expected on equality and international humanitarian law grounds, and how the military courts apply a mandatory sentence is untested. As of mid-2026 no sentence has been imposed under it.

Saudi drug executions. The 2026 pace suggests another high annual total. The live question is whether the concentration of foreign nationals among those executed generates diplomatic pressure from origin states, most of which have limited leverage and large migrant populations in the kingdom.

Iran during the conflict. Rights organisations report accelerated executions of prisoners convicted on political charges since early 2026, alongside restricted independent monitoring. The reliability of any count from inside Iran is now lower than it was, and the gap between announced and unannounced cases is widening.

Syria’s penal code. The transitional authorities have not indicated whether capital offences will be retained, narrowed, or abolished in the new legal framework being drafted. This is one of the few genuinely open questions in the region.

This is a maintained reference page, last updated July 2026. It is revised as laws and circumstances change. Major developments are covered as dated posts in the News section and linked from here.

Discussion Questions

Does your country have the death penalty, and when was that last put to a vote?
In qisas cases the victim’s family can demand execution or pardon. Does that make the penalty more just or less?
Nearly half of all recorded executions worldwide were for drug offences. Should drug crimes ever carry a death sentence?
Amnesty’s figures are minimums produced by an organisation that campaigns for abolition. How should that affect how you read them?
Is it possible to object to how a country carries out executions without objecting to executions themselves?
Foreign migrant workers make up a large share of those executed for drug offences in Saudi Arabia. What does that pattern suggest?
Lebanon may become the first Arab state to abolish the death penalty. Why might abolition succeed there and not elsewhere?
Imagine you are drafting Syria’s new penal code. Do you keep capital punishment, and for what?
Iran executes people under charges like “corruption on earth.” What does a broadly worded capital offence do to a legal system?
Global executions rose 78% in a single year. Does that tell you more about the world or about what is being counted?

Capital Punishment in the Middle East: Executions at a 44-Year High