Israel to halt house razings

JERUSALEM -- Israel announced yesterday it is halting a practice Palestinians find particularly objectionable that also has been denounced by human rights groups: the demolition of the family homes of suicide bombers and other attackers.

The step was the latest on a growing list of good-will gestures by Israel and the Palestinians meant to lay the groundwork for a return to peace negotiations under the Palestinian Authority's new leader, Mahmoud Abbas.

The demolition of bombers' homes had struck a strong symbolic chord with Palestinians, who viewed the practice as an unjust form of collective punishment for suicide attacks that have killed hundreds of Israelis.

In the past 4½ years of fighting, Israeli troops have demolished the family homes of nearly 700 Palestinian attackers, many of them suicide bombers, according to the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem. Under military rules, Israeli authorities were not required to prove that the families involved had prior knowledge of the plans of a bomber or gunman.

The demolitions usually occurred at night, within hours of the attack. Palestinian families often were forced to flee with nothing more than their nightclothes. In many cases, homes that were blown up or knocked down were compounds that housed several generations of a single Palestinian family.

Throughout the current conflict, the practice emphasized the vast gulf between the Israeli and Palestinian perceptions of their own and the other side's suffering.

Israel's army chief of staff, Lieutenant General Moshe Yaalon, whose tenure has been cut short, was one of the first senior Israeli officials to publicly raise misgivings about the practice, arguing that such punitive measures sowed fury and hostility among Palestinians, rather than serving as a deterrent to future attacks as intended.

Yaalon last year appointed a special military panel to examine the demolitions of bombers' homes, and its recommendation that the practice be halted was reported yesterday by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. Within hours, Yaalon's boss, Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, acting with unusual speed on an internal finding, ordered that the practice be stopped immediately.

In announcing the decision, the army emphasized that Israel had acted within its legal rights when it knocked down hundreds of bombers' homes. Palestinians and human rights groups expressed doubts that the practice would have survived a challenge under international law.

According to B'Tselem, more than 4,200 Palestinians were left homeless in the bulldozing or dynamiting of 675 attackers' homes in the past 53 months of fighting.

Separately, Israel has carried out the demolitions of thousands of other homes and buildings, most in the Gaza Strip, to deprive Palestinian gunmen of cover for staging attacks against Israeli troops and Jewish settlers.

Such demolitions carried out for security reasons were not affected by this order.

The decision to stop destroying the homes of attackers was announced as Israel is preparing to free about 500 Palestinian prisoners, nearly 50 of whom were convicted of playing some role in attacks against Israelis.

Palestinians see such releases as an essential good-faith gesture on Israel's part, but they have triggered an emotional backlash in Israel. Yesterday, Israel's Supreme Court rejected a petition by relatives of terror victims to block the prisoner release, which is expected to take place in coming days.

''We found that the composition of the list of prisoners was not made lightly, and the list's makeup takes into account possible considerations, including the expected danger posed by released prisoners," the high court's ruling said.