On Saturday night, Israel’s new, far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, called for an immediate blockade of the home of the family of a Palestinian gunman who, a day earlier, had kill seven people in East Jerusalem before being shot dead by police.
Within hours of Ben-Gvir’s comment, security forces arrived at the gunman’s home early Sunday morning, according to Daniel Shenhar, a human rights lawyer. They wake residents up, give them an hour to pack up some possessions before kicking them out, then block doors and windows – often a prelude to destroy a Palestinian house.
The Israeli military said it issued a mandatory pre-sealing order, as is customary in such cases. But Mr. Shenhar said no residents saw it before security forces moved in: The gunman’s parents were being held in Israel at the time and were only released without charge after the house. has been sealed.
Israel defends such house demolition as a deterrent to prevent future attacks and the new government, the most rightist in the history of Israelare pursuing this policy more actively after a increase in violence recently. Mr. Shenhar said that 75 houses had been completely or partially destroyed since 2014.
The government said it would also seal off the home of a 13-year-old Palestinian boy accused of injuring two people in the hospital another shooting in East Jerusalem – although in the past that measure was often reserved for perpetrators of lethal attacks.
Israel’s sealing and destruction of the family homes of attackers accused of carrying out decades of deadly Israeli attacks has long drawn criticism from human rights groups that call it a crime. collective punishment, prohibited by international law, leaves innocent parents, siblings, and spouses abandoned. even homeless children. Critics also questioned its effectiveness, after hundreds of destruction failed to stop the attacks.
But the new government announced that it is accelerating policy, a change reflected in its recent actions.
At least 35 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire this year, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry – 10 of them, including a 61-year-old woman, in a gunfight on Thursday, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. Five weeks ago. army raid in Jenin in the occupied West Bank.
The day after that raid, Khairy al-Qam, 21, killed seven people, including a 14-year-old boy, outside a synagogue in Neve Yaakov, a predominantly Jewish area . It was his family’s house that had been sealed off with unusual haste.
“It was clear that it was done under pressure,” said Shenhar, head of the legal department of HaMoked, an Israeli human rights organization that has represented dozens of Palestinian families of the attackers. of politicians. Israel Supreme Court.
Israel-Palestinian violence on the rise
“They didn’t give the family any chance to appeal” by acting before they saw the order, he added, although they could still appeal after it happened.
Moussa al-Qam, 48, the father of gunman Neve Yaakov, said he was proud of his son and neglected to seal the house, which is home to at least 10 family members.
“Even if I have to sleep outside, I don’t care,” he said. “As long as my son fulfills his duty, I don’t care.”
Police declined to answer questions about the case, citing a gag order on all details of the investigation.
The hardline government led by Benjamin Netanyahu, sworn a month agoand its supporters have accused the previous government of being powerless in the face of a wave of deadly attacks by Arab attackers in the spring, raising questions about how the new government will act towards the Palestinians at a time of escalating tensions.
Mr. Ben-Gvir, who was convicted of inciting racism and supporting a terrorist group, also ordered authorities to destroy 14 more Palestinian structures in East Jerusalem. The ants were removed because they were built without a city permit.
Palestinians have difficulty obtaining such permits because of the lack of construction planning in East Jerusalem and because of other Israeli land policies. Israel captured East Jerusalem from Jordan during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and later annexed the area in a move not recognized by most of the world.
The new government, which aims to limit the powers of the judiciary, is also talking about implementing additional measures that could be seen as collective punishment. Mr. Netanyahu has proposed to revoke the right to national insurance from “families that support terrorism.”
In a sign the government may be trying to ease tensions with the Palestinians and avoid international criticism, on Wednesday it asked Israel’s Supreme Court for the ninth time to delay the deportation of Palestinians. Palestine from a famous Bedouin village, Khan al. Ahmar, it’s been four months. Village structures were erected without permits.
But with a new focus on destruction and given that the International Court of Justice has recently been tasked with commenting on the Israeli occupation and the state of the conflict, HaMoked’s Shenhar says Israel is “playing with fire”.
Israel has implemented a policy of home destruction by attackers continuously since 1967, based on the decree on emergency defensive regulations introduced by the British authorities in 1945. But the Fourth Geneva Convention expressly states that no protected person – in this case, an inhabitant of an occupied territory – can be punished for crimes they have not personally committed and collective punishments. may be prohibited, as well as taking revenge on their property.
William Schabas, former chairman of the United Nations commission of inquiry into Israel’s military activities in the Gaza Strip in 2014, now a professor of international law at Middlesex University London, said: This issue is international. Such collective punishment has also been defined as a war crime in international courts, he added.
Rejecting the argument by some Israeli officials and experts that the damage caused by this policy is proportionate and greater than the benefits, Professor Schabas said: “The ban is absolute, so you are violate international law if you do it. It’s not something you’ll balance out with benefits.
He noted that there is no military need associated with such cases and the fact that the policy only applies to Palestinians is discriminatory as well.
But even some advocates of the demolition policy admit that there is no way to prove it works.
Yaakov Amidror, a retired general and former national security adviser to Netanyahu and now a senior fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, a conservative think tank, said: There is no way to measure it.
Mr. Amidror said that in the past there have been occasional cases of Palestinians being arrested on suspicion of planning attacks and they said they did not carry out them because they had to think about their families, or cases in which members Family members have complained to the police. to try to save the family home, but it’s almost impossible to tell how many attacks never happened.
However, he said, in the absence of prior intelligence, “The issue being discussed is how to stop the terrorists from getting their knives or pistols or whatever and kill Jews. They make decisions in the morning and kill people in the afternoon.”
The sooner sealing or demolition is done after the event, he said, “the link between action and price is very clear.”
The Israeli military, which issued the order to destroy, had its own doubts. Military Commission 2005 fact check concluded that it borders on illegal and illegal. The military suspended demolition for several years. This policy was resumed shortly after a deadly attack in Jerusalem in 2008 and was continued after another attack on a Jerusalem synagogue in 2014.
Many Palestinians say the destruction not only fails to deter potential attackers but also fosters a spiral of hatred and violence.
“These people, who have not been charged with any crime,” said Dimitri Diliani, a spokesman for the Fatah Democratic Reform bloc, a Palestinian political faction that opposes the current Palestinian leadership in the West Bank. What’s wrong, are losing their home.
Citing the definition of insanity in doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, he said: “This is 100% applicable to the government of Israel, which has committed an unjust crime against with innocent people for many years. It never stopped anything, he said. “If anything, it is an expression of hatred and racism. It creates more people wanting to take revenge on Israel.”
He said the number of people who are victims of this policy is now in the thousands.
Of the 75 homes completely or partially destroyed since 2014, 67 are in the West Bank and eight in East Jerusalem, and more than a dozen have been completely or partially sealed off, according to the data. provided by Mr. Shenhar of HaMoked. Only 10 demolition orders have been rescinded during that time, two after an appeal to the military and eight by the Supreme Court.
The outcome of the appellate trials depends mainly on the composition of the Supreme Court’s panel of judges, because they are divided on policy, Mr. Shenhar said.
“You might ask what is the motivation of families to go to court when homes have mostly been demolished,” he said. “But they wanted to go, so we kept petitioning, and time and time again the Supreme Court had to argue and settle the arguments.”
Patrick Kingsley, Hiba YazbekAnd Gabby Sobelman contribution report.
