Jewish Home MK calls for imprisoning families of terrorists

Jewish Home MK Moti Yogev on Friday proposed incarcerating family members of Palestinian terrorists in internment camps and feeding them rations of just bread and water as a means of deterring future attackers.

Yogev, a former colonel in the Israel Defense Forces, told Army Radio in a Friday morning interview that the government should construct a detention facility like that in the Negev Desert for holding illegal migrants, and use it to imprison the families of convicted Palestinian terrorists.

“There are other means of deterrence,” he said, “such as banishing families of murderers to the Judean Desert — something that’s possible by law — and the creation of a type of Holot [Detention Facility] run by the Military Police.

“It would be understood by every son that he doesn’t want this to happen to his father, mother, sisters and brothers,” Yogev went on. “I have no doubt that this could be a very big deterrent.”

Yogev, a second-term lawmaker with the right-wing religious nationalist Jewish Home party, is no stranger to controversial statements. In October, with the spiraling in tensions between Israelis and Palestinians concerning the Temple Mount, Yogev was filmed yelling and swearing at an Arab woman in the Old City of Jerusalem, telling her to “Go to the grave.”

Following a July High Court of Justice ruling — upholding the court’s own demolition order against two illegal buildings in the West Bank settlement of Beit El — Yogev, a vocal advocate of the settlement movement, railed against the decision, saying: “We have to take the blade of a D-9 [bulldozer] to the High Court of Justice.”

A day later, he said his comments had been out of place and that it’s possible he shouldn’t have made them.