Is it legal to deport terrorists’ families?

As the Knesset Internal Affairs and Environment Committee on Monday proposed a bill to allow for the deportation of terrorists who receive financial compensation from the Palestinian Authority, calls for the deportation of their families continued.

The cabinet proposed to deport terrorists’ families on Saturday night following a series of terrorist attacks in Jerusalem.

While the proposal to revoke citizenship and deport terrorists has received broad support in both the coalition and the opposition, it would be on uncertain legal ground.

It would be the first time such an idea was proposed, Shurat HaDin president Nitsana Darshan-Leitner said.

“Israel is a sovereign state,” she said. “It can legislate any law it deems needed in order to defend itself and defend its citizens. However, there are principles in international law; they don’t overrule internal law, but it may not be accepted internationally.”

According to former state attorney Talia Sasson, “Deporting families isn’t humane; it does not prevent a security threat. What danger do the families present? It is a collective punishment in its most distinct sense.”

The 1949 Geneva Conventions maintain that people cannot be punished for an act they did not commit. Collective punishment is widely considered a war crime.

“To deport the family members of the terrorists is already a different principle,” Darshan-Leitner said. “You can’t punish innocent people for someone else’s wrongdoing. You can’t punish them even if it’s a heinous matter against innocent people.”

Sasson said collective punishment was illegal in internal Israeli law as well.

Under the Geneva Conventions, “you have an obligation as the person who controls the territory to maintain the right to life and security in your residential area,” she said.

Under the Fourth Geneva Convention, when there is a military occupation, it is forbidden to carry out forcible mass transfers of civilians who are not of the nationality of the controlling state. Some consider the West Bank

and Israeli joint drills that could have been veiled threats to Tehran to at least freeze the progress of its nuclear program. However, these drills often took place while Washington was sending hopeful messages about a return to diplomacy, or at least not sending messages that diplomacy was dead.

In May 2022, the US provided refueling platforms for the Israel Air Force to hold one of its largest-ever drills for carrying out “deep” attacks far away from Israel’s borders – often a metaphor for Iran.

In July 2022, the US and Israel held a joint exercise to help protect Israel from Iranian ballistic-missile threats. There were also assorted US-Israel naval and other drills.

However, by August 2022, the US and the world powers were talking about Iran as if a return to the nuclear deal was all but signed.

So it is hard to say that the pre-August 2022 drills sent much of a message about US seriousness to support a viable military option against the ayatollahs’ nuclear program.

By the time the US and Israel held a joint air force drill in November 2022, the deal had fallen apart, but American had not yet closed the door on negotiations.

Fast forward to mid-January, when US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, “With regard to the JCPOA, the Iranians killed the opportunity to come back to that agreement swiftly many months ago.”

The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action had not been on Washington’s agenda as a “practical matter for many months now,” he added. “It’s not our focus. We’re focused on what’s happening in Iran. We’re focused on what Iran is doing in terms of the provision of weapons to Russia to use against innocent people and the entire energy grid in Ukraine.”

US State Department representatives had said similar things before, but now it was coming from the top.

From January 22-25, the US and Israel held what was called at the time their largest-ever joint drill for attacking “deep” targets, just as US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan was visiting Israel.

In the middle of those drills, on January 25, International Atomic Energy Agency Director-General Rafael Grossi described the JCPOA as “an empty shell,” saying diplomatic activity linked to reviving the 2015 nuclear deal was close to nonexistent.

“Nobody has declared it dead, but no obligation is being pursued, and... every limit that existed in the JCPOA has been violated several times,” he said.

Overnight between Saturday and Sunday this past weekend, the drone attack on Isfahan took place.

Hours after the attack, Blinken said Washington still preferred a diplomatic option to prevent a nuclear Iran and ending its aggression. But “all options are available on the table to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon,” he told Al Arabiya.

At the same time that the drone attack occurred, while Blinken was taking an ever-tougher line on Iran, and only days after the giant US-Israeli joint drill, CIA Director William Burns was holding meetings in Israel.

Of course, these could all be coincidences. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu just regained power one month ago, so it is not strange that many US officials would be coming through.

But when you add together the kind of officials coming through, their much tougher tone about the deal being dead, the joint drills and the drone strike, it seems very unlikely that the drone strike did not have US support.

There are all sorts of ways to parse the Pentagon statement that the US had no military involvement in the drone strike.

Might it have had intelligence or cyber involvement? Even if the US really did nothing, the cumulative impact of the strike along with the converging vectors makes it clear that Iran is now far more threatened than it might have been only a few months ago.

The Biden administration was patient with nuclear negotiations with Tehran for nearly two years, and it did very little besides wave its finger in disapproval and add symbolic new sanctions when the ayatollahs continued to move closer to the nuclear threshold.

It is not patient anymore. Whether that is because of Iran supplying drones to Russia with which to attack Ukraine or Tehran’s mass killings of its own people – the gloves are off.

The question now is whether Iran will take the hint and adjust its behavior in some way, as it did in 2012, or remain intransigent and leave whoever hit Isfahan this weekend – the Mossad, according to foreign sources – with increasing American support to do even