EL BIREH, Occupied West Bank -- In a courtyard a few hundred yards from El Bireh City Hall, Omar Asmar's relatives have lived in tents for more than four years, barely protected from rain and cold now that an early winter slashes at the canvas sheets.
The spare four-room house they rented was sealed shut by the Israeli army in 1990 after Mr. Asmar was sent to prison for acts that included throwing gasoline bombs at Israeli soldiers. Shutters were welded and doors boarded up.
Such punishment, routine then for Palestinian militants, later fell into disuse. But its revival in recent days has stirred a new clamor and a debate about different standards for Arabs and Jews accused of mass violence.
Having nowhere else to go in this small city just north of Jerusalem, the Asmars pitched tents right outside the house and have been there ever since, getting their drinking water from a pipe, using an outdoor toilet and cooking meals in an open-air kitchen protected by a corrugated tin roof.
Even after Mr. Asmar, 28, was released from prison in May and started working in a pastry shop around the corner, the army insisted that the house remain shut despite family attempts to reopen it.
"They punished my whole family, not only my son," said Halima Asmar, the mother of three sons and three daughters. "We have no property here. We had no income after he was arrested. So we had no choice but to move into the tents."
For years, such cases formed the core of the Israeli policy of demolishing or sealing houses in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to combat Palestinian resistance to Israel's military occupation.
Hundreds of homes were shut or destroyed, most in the first four years of the uprising, which began in December 1987.
Israel has defended the practice as a deterrent against Arab attacks, calling it legal under emergency regulations imposed in 1945 by the British Mandate of Palestine then in existence.
But Palestinians say, and human-rights groups agree, that the policy violates international law, amounting to collective punishment while doing nothing to stop the uprising.
If anything, they say, resentment bred by such practices produces even more rock-throwers and killers.
The debate lost a good deal of steam after Yitzhak Rabin became prime minister in July 1992. Under the Rabin government, house demolitions and sealings slowed to a trickle, and then stopped after September 1993 with the agreement giving Palestinians self-rule in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank town of Jericho.
But suddenly the issue is back.
Last month, with the blessing of the Israeli High Court of Justice, the army blew up most of the family home of a West Bank Palestinian who carried out the suicide bombing on a Tel Aviv bus that killed 22 passengers and himself in October.
Last week, the authorities sealed shut the Jerusalem houses of three men involved in the kidnapping and killing of an Israeli soldier, Nahshon Waxman, also in October. Two of the three were themselves killed in a failed army rescue mission.
After a recent spurt of suicide attacks by Islamic fundamentalists, Israel decided that it had to revive the policy.
Government lawyers argued, and the court agreed, that the only thing that might stop a suicide bomber was the knowledge that his family would suffer for his actions.
"This is one of the few weapons of deterrence that we have to deal with a situation that's becoming intolerable," an army official said.
As in the past, Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups challenged the deterrence claim and denounced the practice as punishing the wrong people because most of the culprits in these cases were dead.
Besides, they noted, Israel had not touched the Qiryat Arba apartment of Dr. Baruch Goldstein, the Israeli settler who machine-gunned 29 Palestinians to death in Hebron in February and was himself killed.
At the time, the Rabin government briefly considered action but then decided against it, because Goldstein was dead and because the old policy had fallen into disuse. Now critics ask why the family of Salah Souwi, the Tel Aviv bomber, should be treated differently.
The response from the high court, which almost invariably upholds army positions on security matters, is that Goldstein acted alone, even though he used to belong to the anti-Arab Kach movement, while Souwi was an agent of the Islamic resistance group Hamas. Different circumstances justified different courses of action, the judges said in a 4-1 ruling.
Their reasoning did not end the skepticism.
"What's unfair is that the doctor who killed people, this Jewish criminal, did not also have his house sealed," said Taysir Natshe, whose son, Hassan, was one of the slain Waxman kidnappers.