Israel Vows End To House Razing
Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz ordered an end Thursday to the policy of demolishing the houses of Palestinians involved in attacks against Israelis, the military said.
Mofaz decided to "stop exercising the legal right to demolish terrorists' houses as a means of deterrence" after a recommendation from army chief of staff Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon, the statement said.
An internal army review of the policy called it ineffective, concluding that it enflamed anger and failed to deter attacks. The practice has been widely condemned by human rights groups as collective punishment.
Israel has razed more than 1,800 Palestinian homes as punishment since capturing the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the 1967 Mideast war, including 675 in the past four years of fighting, according to the Israeli human rights group B'tselem, which says the policy violates international law.
"We are calling on the chief of staff to immediately approve the findings," said B'tselem spokesman Sarit Michaeli.
House demolitions, along with other army practices, such as targeted killings of Palestinian militants, were suspended after Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas declared a truce last week.
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Punitive demolitions over the last four years have left 4,239 Palestinians homeless, most of them in the West Bank, B'tselem said. Since 2000, more than 1,000 Israelis have been killed in bombings and shootings.
The three-story home belonging to the family of Ala Sanakra, local leader of the violent Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade in the West Bank refugee camp of Balata, was demolished last fall after he recruited a 19-year-old woman from a nearby camp to blow herself up at a busy Jerusalem junction, killing herself and two Israeli policemen.
Sanakra, a bachelor, had his own apartment in the family compound, which was home to a total of nine people. He said the army could have demolished his rooms and spared the rest of the house.
The demolition "motivated me to send more people on missions and gave more motivation to our fighters," Sanakra said in a telephone interview Thursday. He said he has the money to rebuild, but won't because he fears the army will raze any new construction. For now, he rents a room nearby for $180 a month. He said his mother often visits the pile of rubble that was once her home and drinks her morning coffee there.
The policy of house demolitions is a holdover from the British rule of Palestine, and has been used off and on in the West Bank and Gaza since 1967, peaking during the first Palestinian uprising from 1987-1993 and in the current round of violence. Efforts by human rights groups to halt the practice in the courts have failed.
B'tselem said that in many of the demolitions since 2000, adjacent buildings were also damaged or razed. The group said that in half the cases, the army never claimed the houses it demolished were home to Palestinians directly involved in attacks. In 97 percent of the demolitions, residents received no warning, the group said.
Boaz Ganor, an Israeli counter-terrorism expert, said that the policy has been applied too indiscriminately in the past four years, but should not be halted entirely. The military should keep razing houses if relatives of an attacker were involved in violence, or if an attack led to large numbers of Israeli casualties, he said.
Ganor acknowledged that effectiveness was not the military's only consideration, and that demolitions are a way of settling scores and appeasing public opinion. The army revived the policy in October 2001, after a three-year lull. "People expect from governments extreme steps against terrorism, to show something is being done," he said.
The report did not examine Israel's demolition of roughly 3,500 other houses near military posts and settlements, which the army says was needed to prevent attacks on soldiers stationed there.