The Supreme Court Wednesday gave the State a green light to render the house of tractor terrorist Husam Dwayat uninhabitable. Dwayat, of Tzur Baher in eastern Jerusalem, crushed three people to death and injured dozens more when he went on a terrorist rampage with a tractor in Jerusalem on July 2, 2008.
The three-judge panel turned down an appeal from Dwayat’s father against the action and wrote, “The appellant has not made any claim which disproves that destroying the house will have a deterrent effect.”
The State has said that it does not intend to raze the terrorist’s home, but rather to fill it with concrete and make it uninhabitable. The terrorist used to reside on the top floor of a building that also houses his father’s family. The top floor will therefore be sealed but the rest of the building will not be damaged.
Judges Edmond Levy, Asher Grunis and Miriam Naor determined in their verdict that the suffering that the action will cause to the terrorist’s family “is outweighed by the chance that it may deter others from embarking on the path of bloodshed.”
Dwayat’s action was the first attack of its kind but it has since been copied by at least two more Arab terrorists on tractors: on July 22, 2008, a terrorist ran amok on King David Street in Jerusalem, wounding 23.
A tractor driver was arrested after he appeared to attack policemen at Shilat Junction on September 2.
On March 5, 2009, a tractor driver was shot dead after he attacked a police car on Jerusalem’s Menachem Begin Highway.
Four months after the first attack, the defense establishment decided to seal the terrorist’s house, marking a return to a deterrent home-demolition policy that it had abandoned in recent years. The father of the terrorist, Taisir Dwayat, appealed the decision. His lawyer, Atty. Hussein Ganaim, said that the house belonged to the father, who had done no wrong, and not to the son. He also claimed that Israel discriminates between Arab terrorists and Jewish ones, and added that destroying one part of the home would put the rest of the house at risk of collapse.
The State replied that deterrence is essential in order to check Arab terrorism and that “there is no alternative to the exacting of a price from relatives of the terrorists who live with them, and not just directly harming the terrorists or their property.”
Engineers told the court that the rest of the house would not be damaged by the action against the top floor, and succeeded in convincing the judges.