On detention camps – Ofer Aderet in Haaretz:

‘In 1971, under heavy secrecy, Israel built two detention camps in the Sinai Peninsula where innocent Palestinians were sent. One was used for the families of Fatah members who were suspected of terrorism, one was for unemployed young men.
Children, women and men were transported from the Gaza Strip by the Israeli army and put in improvised buildings in the middle of the desert. They spent various stretches there – sometimes even months – in conditions the Red Cross called “unbearable.” Less than a year later, both camps were closed and all the detainees were returned to Gaza.
The minutes of the meetings on the subject were classified as secret for 50 years, some for even longer.
An investigative report on the archives by the Akevot Institute for Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Research, and documents and pictures located in the Israel Defense Forces Archives, the Israel State Archives and the Red Cross archives provide a history of the two camps. The Abu Zenima camp was built on the shores of the Gulf of Suez, and the Nekhel camp was built in the middle of the Sinai Peninsula, which was occupied by Israel in 1967 and fully returned to Egypt in 1982.
Following the 1967 Six-Day War, Gaza was considered a “wasps’ nest” from which terrorists were dispatched to Israel. In the Strip, Palestinians suspected of collaborating with the occupation were murdered.’

(…)

‘Ariel Sharon, the head of the Southern Command, was ordered to “eliminate the terror.” The operation, which continued into mid-1972, employed special units that assassinated suspects, destroyed homes, imposed curfews and conducted searches. But that wasn’t all.

Among the documents are the minutes of a meeting between the first coordinator of government activities in the territories, Gen. Shlomo Gazit, with Foreign Ministry officials. In the memo by ministry officials, the army’s steps to fight terror were detailed, including arrests, curfews and the building of the camps.
To this day, the IDF Archives refuses to reveal the memo’s main points. Any involvement of then-Prime Minister Golda Meir – if indeed there was any – doesn’t appear in any document released to date.
Abu Zenima was opened on January 5, 1971, about 300 kilometers (186 miles) southwest of Gaza City. It was named after the town where it was located in southwest Sinai on the shores of the Gulf of Suez. Shortly after it was completed, the first prisoners were sent there – 50 members of a single Palestinian family.’

(…)

‘On January 26, Gazit briefed members of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on the situation. He detailed the steps Israel had taken in Gaza, including the “third mechanism” – families being deported.
As he put it, “Because the family provides a place to hide, provides help and serves as a lookout that warns the terrorist – and in the refugee camps this makes it impossible to conduct searches without giving the terrorist a good chance of escaping – we have taken as of today 27 families of wanted men, deported them from their places of residence and transferred them to Sinai, to Abu Zenima. We have ensured that every family like this includes at least one adult male so that we don’t have to deal with women and children alone.”’

(…)

‘MK Gideon Hauser, a former attorney general, was critical of the expulsion policy. “I ask about the deporting of family members. We’re not talking about families we know actively assisted a member who was a terrorist. We’re talking about the families of wanted people, why we assume they helped the terrorist escape,” he said.
“I think that in deporting families like these, despite the rewards that may come from stopping a terrorist ... the reward will end up costing us. If there is proof that a certain family systematically provides shelter like this, we need to do what we have to do to stop it. But if we’re dealing with a family we only suspect might be doing this, that’s serious.” In February 1971, Israel allowed the Red Cross into the camp. Members of the delegation met with representatives of the 23 families being held there – 140 people, of whom 87 were children – all of them Gazans. The Red Cross people wrote to their headquarters in Geneva after the visit: “Their only fault was having a ‘terrorist’ parent. But does a baby of only 7 months, or an old mother of 80, understand the reason for their presence there? ... The most important problem is psychological: The people here hoped their deportation would only be temporary.” When the Red Cross representatives met with Gazit a second time, they expressed concern over what they called “almost inhuman conditions” at the camp. Gazit responded that “these families were isolated to prevent them from providing shelter to their relative, or relatives, wanted for terror-related offenses.” He said that this method had proved an effective way of capturing wanted men, and that after they had been caught, the families were released from the camp and returned to Gaza. Because this was so effective, Israel had not set a date for ending the practice, Gazit added.’

(…)

‘Gazit justified sending hundreds of innocent people to a camp in the middle of the desert. “Young men wandering freely around the streets constitutes an open invitation for organizations to recruit them. And it’s also a danger in that they’re wandering around the main roads and can open fire, throw grenades or do other things.”’

(…)

‘Akevot suspects that this is written evidence of Israel’s strategy to thin out Gaza’s population at the time. Akevot’s director, Lior Yavne, notes that “after the occupation of the Gaza Strip in 1967, Israel worked in various ways to reduce the number of refugees in the Gaza Strip” – the mood among policy makers was that Gaza would eventually be annexed.
According to Yavne, “The camp in Nekhel was designed to give young Gazans job training in construction and encourage them to agree to move to the West Bank, in exchange for their release from the prison camp.” Yavne also discusses this in Akevot’s Hebrew-language podcast “Aims and Means: The Secret and Hidden Stories behind the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.” After the Red Cross visit to Nekhel in 1971, the organization told Gazit: “While the detainees in Nekhel enjoy relative freedom in the prison facility compared to regular prisons, the facility’s location in such an isolated area, far from any plant or animal, could create psychosomatic difficulties among the detainees.” Gazit replied that the subject might be suitable for a sociological study.
The two camps were closed that same year, and all the detainees at Abu Zenima were returned to Gaza. The detainees at Nekhel did not fulfill the Israelis’ hopes; they showed no interest in moving to the West Bank. But the Israelis believed that their effort to stamp out terror proved effective: For more than 15 years, until the outbreak of the first intifada in 1987, relative quiet was maintained in Gaza.
“The case of the Nekhel and Abu Zenima camps is apparently the first example of the development and implementation of methodical tools to put pressure on innocent Palestinians – students, children, women – to achieve security and political aims in the framework of Israel’s occupation of the territories,” Yavne says. He mentions the bill to expel relatives of terrorists that reached the Knesset only two months ago.
According to the bill’s explanatory notes, “In expelling members of the nuclear family, there is no doubt that the package of deterrence will be completed to deter terrorists and get terrorists’ relatives to prevent their children from committing this act. Looking toward the future, the expulsion of families of terrorists will save the lives of many Israeli citizens.”’

Read the complete article here.
In German this is called ‘sippenhaft’.

Collective punishment as a tool to break the enemy and has been used in almost every war. Civilian deaths in Afghanistan or Iraq caused by either side could also be considered collective punishment. A terrorist attack is a form of collective punishment as well, which is to say that collective punishment is always psychological warfare.

Destroying houses is collective punishment as well, needless to say.

Resettling complete families into desert camps, just because a family might have been a terrorist is a clear sign of military dictatorship. The fact that Israel classified meetings about these camps ‘secret for 50 years or longer’ is telling. State secrets after all reveal the brutal nature of the state.