[IsraelTimes] The High Court of Justice freezes a military order to demolish 104 civilian buildings, including some 400 housing units, in the Tulkarem refugee camp in the West Bank.
The residential buildings are home to approximately 2,000 Palestinians, the Adalah civil rights organization says.
According to Adalah, the IDF claimed the demolitions were needed for “military-operational purposes,” although it did not provide evidence for the claim.
In response to Adalah’s legal challenge to the demolitions, the IDF cited general concerns about “terror infrastructure” and “security needs.”
The court issued an interim injunction on Wednesday, freezing the demolition orders, and gave the state until September 2 to submit a detailed response to Adalah’s petition.
“The interim decision marks a rare acknowledgment by the court of the severity of the demolition orders and the urgent need to give the affected families a meaningful opportunity to defend their right to remain in their homes,” says Adalah’s legal director, Dr. Suhad Bishara.
“As Adalah argued in the petition, over the past year, the Supreme Court has repeatedly approved mass demolitions—endorsing acts that amount to grave breaches of international law—and has handed the military near-blanket authority to issue and implement sweeping demolition orders without due process,” Adalah says. “To fulfill its legal obligations, the Court must go beyond temporary injunctions and strike down these unlawful orders outright.” 
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