Israel tries to deter with demolitions

At first, after the house was demolished by the Israeli army, Maher Salem thought his father had been arrested by soldiers.

But as the hours went by last Sunday, and he received no news, he began to suspect the worst. "We cut through the concrete in his room and found his hand," said Maher of his father Ashur, a retired carpenter. "We continued digging and we pulled out his body."

The destruction of the six-story Salem house, which left 56 people homeless, was one of three demolitions last in the Beit Lahiya area of homes belonging to relatives of Palestinians blamed for attacks on Israelis. Maher's brother, Hisham, a wanted leader of the armed wing of Islamic Jihad, orchestrated an attack in Tel Aviv in 1996 that killed 20 Israelis and has staged subsequent attacks, the Israeli army says.

They come as part of a larger Israeli policy of rapid-fire demolitions launched in August. The military says is a bid to create a deterrent to the suicide bombings that have ravaged the country for two years. According to army spokesman Capt. Jacob Dallal, the demolition campaign was launched after an army assessment concluded that part of the motivation for suicide bombers was that their family's status improved after the bombing, with their child's act being widely viewed as heroic. "Also in some cases we saw that the family somehow encouraged the bombing and afterwards the parents would say how proud they were. We decided to break this trend."

Army intelligence has found specific cases of bombers being discouraged by their families because their house would be destroyed, Captain Dallal says. "We hope that now the family will pay more attention," he says.

For those whose houses are destroyed, the Israeli army action is the beginning of a journey into deepening poverty and severe psychological stress, according to Dalal Salameh, a Palestinian legislator from Balata refugee camp in Nablus in the West Bank. "These are people who have already lost their jobs because of the economic siege and now they lose their houses for which they worked 20 or 30 years. They don't know where to begin again." Ms. Salameh believes demolitions fuel a desire for revenge and "encourage more extremism in our society."

In that sense, the demolition campaign, launched with the backing of Israel's two major parties, Labor and Likud, is a sign of the times. Human rights advocates argue they constitute collective punishment and contravene the Fourth Geneva Convention. At the outset of the campaign, in August, Israel's High Court of Justice for the first time gave approval to demolitions without prior warning.

"This is the ripest environment for house demolitions ever," says Jeff Halper, head of the Israel Coalition Against Home Demolitions. "It is open season out there." Since August, there have been 88 demolitions of homes of relatives of militants, compared to nine in the first half of the year and eight in all of 2001, according to the Israeli human rights group B'tselem. November was the peak month with 30.

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