As Violence Grows, Israel Razes More Homes
JERUSALEM — On January 29, Israel’s new, far-right minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, called for the immediate sealing of the family home of a Palestinian gunman who, a day earlier, had killed seven people in East Jerusalem before being shot dead by the police.
Security forces arrived early the next morning at the home, according to Daniel Shenhar, a human rights lawyer. They woke up the residents, gave them an hour to gather some possessions before evicting them, then blocked the doors and windows — usually a prelude to demolishing a Palestinian home.
The Israeli military said it had issued a required warrant, as is customary. But Mr. Shenhar said none of the inhabitants had seen it before the security forces moved in: The gunman’s parents were in Israeli detention and were released, without charges, only after the house had been sealed.
Israel defends home demolitions as a deterrent to future attacks, and the new government, the most right-wing in Israel’s history, is pursuing the policy more aggressively after a recent surge of violence. Since 2014, Mr. Shenhar said, 75 houses have been completely or partly demolished.
Israel’s decades-old practice of sealing and demolishing the family homes of assailants accused of carrying out deadly attacks on its citizens has long drawn criticism from human rights groups that call it collective punishment, prohibited by international law, leaving innocent family members homeless. Critics also question its effectiveness, after hundreds of demolitions have failed to halt the attacks.
At least 35 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire this year, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health — 10 of them in a gunfight on January 26 during an army raid in Jenin in the occupied West Bank.
A day after that raid, Khairy al-Qam, 21, killed seven people
outside a synagogue in Neve Yaakov, a mostly Jewish area. It was his family’s home that was sealed with unusual haste.
“It was clear it was done under pressure from the politicians,” said Mr. Shenhar, the head of the legal department of HaMoked, an Israeli human rights organization that has represented dozens of Palestinian families of assailants in mostly unsuccessful appeals against home demolitions in Israel’s Supreme Court.
Moussa al-Qam, 48, the father of the Neve Yaakov gunman, said he was proud of his son and shrugged off the sealing of the house that was 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 fulfilled his duty, I don’t care.”
The police declined to answer questions about the case, citing a gag order on all details of the investigation.
The hard-line government led by Benjamin Netanyahu, sworn in on December 29, and its supporters had accused the previous government of impotence in the face of a deadly wave of attacks by Arab assailants last spring, raising questions about how the new government would act toward the Palestinians.
Mr. Ben-Gvir, who was convicted in the past for incitement to racism and support for a terrorist group, has also ordered the authorities to demolish 14 more Palestinian structures in East Jerusalem because they were built without municipal permits.
Israel has demolished assailants’ homes on and off since 1967, based on a law introduced by British authorities when they controlled the area.
But the Fourth Geneva Convention states that no protected person — in this case residents of an occupied territory — may be punished for offenses they have not personally committed.
But even some supporters of the demolitions acknowledge that there is no way of proving they work as a deterrent.
Yaakov Amidror, a retired general and former national security adviser to Mr. Netanyahu, said there had been occasional cases of Palestinians who were arrested on suspicion of planning attacks and who said they did not carry them out because they had to think of their family, or cases in which family members tipped off the police to try to save the family home, but it was virtually impossible to say how many attacks never happened.
Nevertheless, he said, the sooner the sealing or demolition is carried out after a deadly attack, the better: “Then the connection between the action and the price is very clear.”
Many Palestinians say demolitions not only fail to deter potential attacks but also feed the cycle of hatred and violence.
“If anything, it’s an expression of hatred and racism,” 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. “It creates more people who want to take revenge against Israel.”