Palestinian Authority rebuilding terrorist homes razed by Israeli forces

The Palestinian Authority and associated institutions have been rebuilding homes of terrorists destroyed by the Israel Defense Forces.

By Aryeh Savir/TPS

The Palestinian Authority and associated institutions have been rebuilding homes of terrorists destroyed by the Israel Defense Forces, the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center revealed in a detailed report.

The IDF razes homes where terrorists lived as part of a punitive and preventative measure meant to deter future attacks. But the center says that the PA rebuilds the homes in “an act of defiance to challenge the deterrent message Israel sends by destroying” them.

The Meir Amit center reported on two recent cases that illustrate the PA’s policy.

The first involves Fatah activists and the municipality where terrorist Ashraf Naalwa lived. The IDF recently knocked Naalwa’s home down, and then only partially, in December.

Naalwa murdered Ziv Hajbi and Kim Yehezkel-Levengrond at the Barkan Industrial Park in October. IDF forces killed him in a shootout after a two-month manhunt.

Local Palestinians formed a special committee entrusted with building his family a new home, erected a mourning tent in his hometown after Naalwa was killed and held an event to raise donations.

The members of the committee told those who came to offer condolences about the preparations being made to build a new house and let the Naalwa family know about their intention to do so.

They said that if the engineering inspections indicated that it was possible to restore the old house, it would be restored and be turned over to the Waqf (the Muslim endowment) for the shaheeds (“martyrs”) as a social center.

The Tulkarm municipality announced a donation of 10,000 Jordanian dinars (some $14,000). The city said that the goal is to rebuild “the house of the heroic Shaheed Ashraf Na’alwa.”

The municipality took upon itself to prepare all the technical plans for building the house and the responsibility for overseeing its construction.

Issam Abu Baker, the governor of the Tulkarm district who is involved in the process, is a PA employee.

Second terrorist home

The second case the Meir Amit center describes involves the apartment of Islam Yusuf Abu Hamid.

The center reports that a senior Fatah figure, Jamal al-Muheisen, said that PA President Mahmoud Abbas ordered the rebuilding of Hamid’s home.

Hamid killed IDF soldier Ronen Lubarsky by dropping a marble slab on his head during an IDF operation in Ramallah in June. That home, too, was only recently destroyed last month.

At a meeting on the subject in Ramallah last month, al-Muheisen stressed the need to speed up the restoration of the apartment.

He said that in addition to repairing the family’s house, nearby houses damaged during the IDF demolition operation would also be fixed up, adding that the PA would find temporary dwellings for the families during the repairs.

Al-Muheisen reiterated that the PA and Fatah would remain loyal to the shaheeds as well as to incarcerated terrorists and all their families until the “establishment of the state of Palestine.” He also said that Fatah would continue to rebuild the houses destroyed by the IDF in Jerusalem, Jenin, Shechem (Nablus), Gaza and Hebron.