House demolition (military)

This article is about a tactic for combating an insurgency. For civilian demolition of houses, see demolition.

A Palestinian home after demolition by Israeli security forces

House demolition (also known as house razing) is a tactic for combating an insurgency, particularly an insurgency which employs suicide attacks.

Purposes

House demolition has several purposes:

• Deterring an individual from conducting militant activities, by tagging it with a heavy price: the demolition of the family's house.
• Destroying militant infrastructures such as bombs labs, headquarters and offices.
• Forcing out an individual who barricades inside a house, which may be rigged with explosives, without risking soldiers' lives.
• Prevent shooting on forces by destroying possible sniper posts.
• During combat: to demolish a house from which militants are shooting.
• Clear way for tanks and heavy APCs.

Means

• Armored bulldozers
• Explosives planted by Combat engineering forces.
• Bombing the house with artillery or aircraft

History

According to author Samuel Katz, "Destroying the house of a terrorist was a punitive measure that dated back to the British Mandate. It was cruel and after the fact, but it was meant to convince fathers to convince their sons that carrying out a terrorist attack, no matter how justified in the grander struggle, meant enormous hardship for the family." House demolitions are usually done without prior warning and often during the night. The home's inhabitants are given little time to evacuate - usually between a few minutes to half an hour.

House demolition has been used in an on-again-off-again fashion by the Israeli government during the al-Aqsa Intifada. More than 3,000 homes have been destroyed in this way, making tens of thousands homeless.

House demolition was used to destroy the family homes of Saleh Abdel Rahim al-Souwi (perpetrator of the Tel Aviv bus 5 massacre) and Yahya Ayyash (Hamas's chief bombmaker, known as "the engineer"). The victims are often amongst the poorest and most disadvantaged in both Israeli and Palestinian society. The majority of the demolished houses were the homes of refugee families that were expelled by Israeli forces or who fled during the war that followed the creation of Israel in 1948.

Criticism and responses

The effectiveness of house demolitions as a detterence has been questioned. In 2005 an Isreali Army commission to study house demolitions concluded found no proof of effective deterrence and concluded that the damage caused by the demolitions overrides its effectiveness. As a result, the IDF approved the commissions recommendatiosn to end punitive demolitions of Palestinian houses.

A number of Human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch and the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, oppose the practice. They argue that the practice violates international laws against collective punishment, the destruction of private property, and the use of force against civilians.

Dr. Meir Margalit of Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions writes:

"The thinking is that a national threat calls for a national response, invariably aggressive. Accordingly, a Jewish house without a permit is an urban problem; but a Palestinian home without a permit is a strategic threat. A Jew building without a permit is ‘cocking a snook at the law’; a Palestinian doing the same is defying Jewish sovereignty over Jerusalem."

Israeli historian Yaacov Lozowick writes:

"Demolishing the homes of civilians merely because a family member has committed a crime is immoral. If, however,... potential suicide murderers... will refrain from killing out of fear that their mothers will become homeless, it would be immoral to leave the Palestinian mothers untouched in their homes while Israeli children die on their school buses."

See also

• Operation Murambatsvina

External links

• Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions
• Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions USA