WITH the walls stripped bare and the furniture dismantled, members of the Abu Jamal family gathered last week for perhaps the final Friday lunch in a home that will soon be blown up. Alaa Abu Jamal, a married father of three, drove his car into a Jerusalem bus stop on October 13th, and then hacked a bystander to death with a meat cleaver. He was shot by a security guard and arrested. Israeli authorities decided to destroy his family’s home in Jebel al-Mukaber, a grim district in East Jerusalem, as a further punishment. The courts have imposed a one-week stay, but the demolition could still occur early in November.

It is a controversial practice based on emergency regulations imposed by the British Mandate in 1945, which authorised commanders to destroy the homes of Palestine’s restive inhabitants. Israel demolished or sealed 1,300 houses in the two decades after it occupied the West Bank in 1967, and hundreds more during the first and second intifadas, or Palestinian uprisings.

Human-rights groups call this collective punishment. Western governments condemn it. The Fourth Geneva Convention bars an occupying power from demolishing private homes except where “rendered absolutely necessary by military operations.” But the practice continued until 2005, when the Israeli army itself studied it and recommended a halt. Only three homes were blown up or sealed in the nine years after the army panel issued its report.

Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, ended the lull last winter, amid a wave of car bombs in Jerusalem. The violence fizzled out within weeks, but has resumed this month: ten Israelis have been murdered and more than 70 wounded in some 45 stabbings and shootings, half of them in and around Jerusalem. (Dozens of Palestinian protesters have also died, most in confrontations with the Israeli army.)

Mr Netanyahu has ordered security forces to accelerate the demolitions, and the army has handed demolition orders to at least seven families this month, according to HaMoked, an Israeli NGO that provides legal aid.

Israel argues that the practice saves lives; Mr Netanyahu’s spokesman says that it is a way to restrain attackers who “have no qualms whatsoever about killing themselves in order to kill others.” A study in 2014, by Israeli and American academics, found that punitive demolitions brought a short-lived but measurable decrease in suicide attacks during the second intifada. But other research, not least the army’s own study, suggests that there is no effect.

And there is a striking counter-example just a few hundred metres up the hill from Alaa Abu Jamal’s house. His cousin Ghassan lived there until November, when he and another relative murdered five rabbis and a policeman in an assault on a Jerusalem synagogue. Both were shot dead. After a long delay, Ghassan’s house was demolished on October 6th. His brother Mu’ataz said that Alaa Abu Jamal stood with the family in the early morning cold while army sappers set their charges. The demolition left six people homeless. Fresh posters praising all three Abu Jamals as martyrs hang over the mangled concrete and rebar. “His cousin saw the demolition, and a week later he carried out his own attack,” said Dalia Kerstein, the director of HaMoked. “I don’t see any deterrence here.”