Israel’s Civil Rights Association is trying to save the home of the widow and children of a West Bank Palestinian who injured an Israeli soldier before being shot dead.
The association’s attorney, Yehoshua Shoffman, argued Thursday that the Israel Defense Force has no right to demolish the home of a deceased person alleged to have committed a security offense, because it is the innocent survivors who suffer.
Munzir Abdullah, 33, a Hebron shopkeeper, was shot to death by an IDF soldier on April 14, after hitting and injuring another soldier with his car. Eyewitnesses maintained the collision was an accident.
But the IDF claims it found a letter on Abdullah’s body making clear his intention to kill an Israeli soldier, though it so far has refused to produce the document.
The IDF ordered Abdullah’s home demolished, a punitive measure authorized under the emergency regulations of the British Mandate, which Israel has retained.
Abdullah’s widow and six children have been evicted with their belongings and live in a tent donated by neighbors. Their house has been sealed, its doors and windows welded shut, pending the Civil Rights Association’s appeal to the military authorities governing the territory.
The IDF also shut the family’s grocery business.
Shoffman wrote to Brig. Gen. Ya’acov Or, commander in the West Bank, that the army had no legal authority to demolish the house, even if Abdullah injured the soldier intentionally.
According to Shoffman, since the suspect has been killed, the punishment would fall on innocent family members.
IDF officials say demolitions are not punishment, but a deterrent to others who might contemplate security offenses.
More than 330 houses of Palestinians accused of security crimes have been demolished since the intifada, or Palestinian uprising, began some 40 months ago. Another 200 houses remain sealed.
The Civil Rights Association charged that demolitions are patently discriminatory because no such measures are taken against Jews who commit ideologically motivated crimes against Arabs. The association said that type of punishment contradicts the “values, justice and ethics” of the State of Israel.
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