RAMALLAH, West Bank — On Thursday, Israeli soldiers razed the family home of Eslam Froukh, a Palestinian man charged with carrying out a pair of deadly Jerusalem bus stop bombings last year. Soon after the explosions rang out in this normally quiet neighborhood of downtown Ramallah, clashes erupted between Palestinians and Israeli soldiers.
Viral social media footage from the confrontation showed Palestinians hurling explosives at Israeli armored vehicles, children coughing from Israeli tear gas and a prominent Palestinian journalist being rushed to a hospital after he was shot in the head with a rubber bullet.
Israel has demolished 27 homes of suspected and convicted terrorists since the start of 2022, according to the Israeli rights group B’Tselem, including 10 already this year — at the current pace, it would be the most demolitions since 2016, the tail end of the “knife intifada,” when Palestinians carried out deadly attacks using knives, cars and other unconventional weapons.
Israel says the home demolitions serve a wider strategy of deterrence, at a time when terrorist attacks are again on the rise. Palestinians have killed at least 48 people in Israel and the West Bank over the last year and a half. But some security experts say the strategy is counterproductive, feeding the cycle of violence rather than containing it. And human rights advocates condemn the practice as collective punishment and a violation of international law. Froukh’s relatives say the destruction of their home had only one purpose.
“It was revenge,” said Froukh’s mother, who requested that she be referred to by her Arabic moniker, Umm Eslam, as she surveyed the shell of the second floor. She said her son, a 26-year-old mechanical engineer with a degree from a Jerusalem college, was framed for the attack, rejecting claims from Israeli police that he was motivated by Islamic extremism.
“He couldn’t have done it,” said Umm Eslam, referring to Israeli police statements saying her son had acted alone and, in the aftermath of the bombings in November, had stockpiled explosives and a Carlo-style submachine gun in an open-air dugout in preparation for future attacks.
Standing in a hollowed-out doorway, Umm Eslam was surrounded by the traces of well-wishers who have streamed through since Thursday: handprints, slogans of solidarity and a few signatures from the newly formed groups here that have vowed to take up arms against Israel.
For decades, in fits and starts correlated with waves of violence, Israel has leveled family homes of Palestinian accused of terrorism, part of an ongoing “war of attrition,” in the words of Qadura Fares, president of the nongovernmental Palestinian Prisoners Society in Ramallah.
Israel is “trying to raise the price of Palestinian resistance to the occupation, which [they] think will force Palestinians into making peace,” Fares continued.
Instead, home demolitions have inspired rage among Palestinians, he said, and offered inroads for Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other armed groups, who often appear at the doorstop of families made homeless, offering to pay for reconstruction and curry political support.
Home demolitions “are just making new war,” Fares said.
Israeli military officials assert that the loss of property deters future attackers, citing mostly anecdotal evidence of families turning relatives over to the authorities.
The academic research is thin and inconclusive. A 2015 study surveying the practice during the wave of suicide bombings of the second intifada found that “punitive house demolitions have a significant, albeit short-lived, negative impact on the number of suicide terrorists,” though it added that other variables, like the status of militant cells, could contribute to the apparent cause-and-effect relationship.
A 2021 study, looking at the same period, and co-written by one of the same authors, showed that punitive home demolitions had no real impact, but “precautionary” home demolitions, in which the army, for example, razes a building it says could be used for sniping, makes “Palestinians more likely to adapt more radical political opinions.”
Former Israeli Supreme Court judge Menachem Mazuz said the aim of the tactic was “to placate public opinion,” even though “the leadership is also aware that this is not what will prevent the next act of terror.” The U.S. State Department has called it “counterproductive to the cause of peace.”
In 2005, an Israeli military commission deemed it only “borderline legal” before abruptly pausing the practice. Israel resumed demolitions after a 2008 Palestinian shooting that killed eight students at a Jerusalem yeshiva, with the provision that the practice would be enacted only in extraordinary circumstances.
But as the conflict and the occupation trudged onward, the measure became routine.
Now, as Israel’s most far-right government in history vows to expand and intensify the practice, many critics say its real purpose is not counterterrorism, but political demagoguery, intended to satisfy constituencies who demand something — anything — in response to deadly, brutal, often shocking attacks.
Danny Yotam, the former head of Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, said the country relies on intelligence, rather than deterrence, to prevent future attacks. And while he is a proponent of home demolitions, he said that for the practice to work, it needed to be applied with “proportionality” — a concept he said was absent from Israel’s current government, “which does not just aim to demolish, but to create a Jewish, religious, halachic state from the Sea to the Jordan Rivers.”
Following a deadly shooting outside a synagogue in January, far-right Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir pushed for demolitions of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem. He said the homes lacked the necessary municipal permits, which Palestinians say are mostly impossible to obtain. “We will fight terrorism using all means at our disposal,” he tweeted.
As violence surges and far-right politicians grasp for ways to satisfy voters that were promised a “tough on terror” approach, many security and legal experts worry that home demolitions are being carried out even less judiciously than in the past.
“Deterrence is a shell game,” said Yuval Shany, a law professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “Even when there’s reason to believe that there’s intergenerational harm, that there is no data showing that it contributes to security, the dominant consideration has become that of the political echelon.”
Shany added that Israel’s Supreme Court, which has long been divided over home demolitions, is now under attack by the government and will probably have even less leverage to contest problematic policies.
Bassem Halqa, 35, who owns a convenience store below the demolished Froukh apartment in Ramallah, said that with “war criminals” like Ben Gvir in power in Israel, he shuddered to think of what other punitive measures were in store.
Halqa said he worried for the safety of his children, one of whom sat on his shop stoop, absently firing rounds on a toy gun.
Sufian Taha contributed to this report.
