No open doors on sealed houses: Sarah Helm reports from Ramallah on Israel's policy of punishing Palestinians by denying them their family homes

LIKE a lioness guarding her lair, Lequeh Frouh sat on her haunches outside her ruined kitchen, refusing to move.

The 73-year-old woman had made some attempt to restore order. The weeds pushing through the flagstones had been cut back a little, and the crumbling plaster swept into a pile.

But the twisted window frames and the holed concrete still bore ugly testimony to the assault against this humble stone building five years ago when it was sealed with blow torches and iron bars by the Israeli army. 'This is where I baked my bread,' she said proudly, pointing to her old oven, which is now a pile of rubble.

The entire family were expelled from their home as a punishment for the 'security offences' of one son, Essam, then aged 18, who was active in intifada protests. While their son was in jail, the family rented a two-room flat in Ramallah, passing every day to look at their boarded-up home.

Four weeks ago Essam was freed. It was not the Israelis who unsealed the house this week, however, but the Palestinian Centre for the Study of Non-Violence, which is campaigning to open all the estimated 500 homes sealed by the Israelis during the occupation. Happy to be home, Mrs Frouh is still afraid of the future. 'The Israelis may come back again. They have given us a warning,' she said.

Last weekend the family home of Samer Masri, in the village of al- Azzarieh, was opened up by the same human-rights activists, only to be resealed the next day by the Israeli army, which placed the entire village under curfew as it carried out the work. As in the Ramallah case, Mr Masri's entire family had been punished for his alleged 'security crimes'. Mr Masri, a supporter of the peace process, was released a year ago after two years in jail.

The Israeli army announced on Tuesday that anyone who unseals a house without permision of the army would be prosecuted and the house resealed.

'What is the wisdom of resealing the house of someone like this, who has paid his dues in jail and supports the peace?' asked Daoud Kuttab, a Palestinian journalist and spokesman for the centre.

The controversy has provided a timely reminder that, while some sort of peace may be coming to Gaza and Jericho, the rest of the West Bank remains firmly under Israeli occupation, with negotiations on extending self-rule to these areas not even started.

Israel is unused to the kind of unilateral action being carried out by the Palestinian non-violence centre, and has clearly decided to show a firm response. However, whether in the current atmosphere the Israeli army can really proceed with its threat to prosecute the 'unsealers' and reseal opened homes, remains questionable.

The non-violence centre, which seems to have found courage in the Gaza-Jericho spirit of peace, says its next campaign will be unilaterally to rebuild houses destroyed by the Israeli army on similar spurious 'security grounds' as other houses were sealed.

The sealing and demolition of homes, which is contrary to the Fourth Geneva Convention, is, for Palestinians, one of the most loathed forms of 'collective punishment' used by the Israeli army.

Israel has always argued that the actions punish and deter the militants, or those who may be pressed into assisting them. After 27 years of occupation, however, and with an estimated 500 houses demolished, in addition to the 500 sealed, there is little evidence that such actions have achieved anything other than to harden anti-Israeli attitudes among mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers. Throughout the West Bank and Gaza, sealed houses, windows often blotted out with wooden boards and doors blackened by blow-torches, stand as monuments to humiliation. 'I want a war against all the Jews after this,' said Mrs Frouh, 'so this kind of thing can never happen again'.

According to figures compiled by al-Haq, the Palestinian human- rights body, almost all the sealing or demolition orders have been imposed on the basis of alleged acts by an individual suspect living in a house. However, in less than 10 per cent of the cases had the suspect been convicted of the offence. In the other cases the suspect was either awaiting trial or still undergoing investigation at the time the action was taken against his family home.