HCJ approved yet another punitive demolition of a Palestinian home in the West Bank: In a minority opinion, Justice Baron ruled that this measure had not been proven effective for deterrence, making the demolition of innocent people’s home disproportionate

On July, 17, 2022, the High Court of Justice (HCJ) rejected HaMoked’s petition to cancel a punitive demolition order for two apartments in a five-story extended-family home in Rummanah village in the West Bank. One is an uninhabited ground-floor apartment which is under construction. The second apartment comprises the top three floors of the building, and is home to four people suspected of no wrongdoing – the grandmother, the grandfather, the father and the aunt of a man indicted for a fatal attack against Israelis on May 5, 2022, in which three Israelis were killed. The building is owned by the grandfather. On the 2^nd floor, not threatened with demolition, lives the assailant’s uncle with his wife and children.

Writing for the majority, Justice Stein dismissed HaMoked’s principled arguments that home demolition is an unacceptable collective punishment prohibited in international law. Conversely, the Court embraced the updated opinion of the Israel Security Agency (ISA) – presented ex parte alongside other classified materials – whereby home demolitions under Regulation 119 of the British Mandate had a “deterring influence”. Justice Kasher, who sided with Stein, stressed that there was a need to periodically revalidate the security opinion. He noted that in the case in hand, making an elderly couple homeless was indeed “a substantial consideration which must be taken into account”. However, Justice Kasher cited the military’s clarification that a partial demolition that refrained from demolishing the grandparents’ living quarters would “severely damage the deterrence objective of the order” and ruled the demolition a "pardonable necessity".

In a minority opinion, Justice Baron ruled that the military order should be reduced in scope to exclude the third floor where the grandparents live. Her ruling was based on her finding that the ISA’s security opinion was “far from compelling, not only because of what it contains, but primarily because of what it does not contain… The mere attempt to present effectiveness for deterrence [purposes] as if it were empirically proven is doomed to fail”. The Justice put it plainly: “…the past few years have been marked by bloodshed and terrorist attacks. This, despite the fact that at the same time, the Military Commander has been making frequent use of the tool of home demolitions”. Therefore, ruled Baron, “in circumstances where the deterrence embodied in the tool of home demolitions raises considerable doubt, my opinion is that use of this measure in a case where innocent family members live in the home does not meet the requirements of proportionality”.