Every time he closes his eyes he is overwhelmed – by the struggle to understand the violent actions of his son and to survive the Israeli government's decision to punish his family for those actions.

On November 18, his son Ghassan, with his cousin Uday, took meat cleavers and a gun to a synagogue in the ultra-Orthodox Jerusalem neighbourhood of Har Nof and killed five people.

The vicious, frenzied attack in a place of worship shocked people on both sides of the divided city and had many speculating whether the tit-for-tat attacks had escalated past the point of no return.

The two young Palestinians were shot dead at the scene by security forces. But their deaths were not enough. Their families must continue to pay for their crimes, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered.

Reviving a policy that was shelved almost a decade ago, Mr Netanyahu issued instructions to security forces to demolish the Abu Jamal family home in Jabal al-Mukabbir and revoke the residency of Nadia Abu Jamal, Ghassan Abu Jamal's widow.

At least five other homes not associated with this attack are listed for demolition, and although the Israeli Supreme Court on Thursday issued temporary orders preventing their destruction following family legal action, not a single human rights organisation contacted by Fairfax Media believes any of the houses will be spared.

Three homes owned by the families of other men accused of unrelated crimes have already been demolished since August, human rights groups say.

The night before Fairfax Media visited 70-year-old Mr Abu Jamal, "dozens of soldiers came to our house to measure it in order to work out how they will destroy it".

His son's actions came out of nowhere, he says, with no hint of any kind of impending violence.

"My son was not religious, he did not go to the mosque to pray – I cannot believe my child would do such a thing," Mr Abu Jamal says.

But after days of agonising over how someone so loved could commit such an act, he says this: "When an external force exerts such pressure on a person and makes it impossible for him to live, to earn his daily bread, when you increase the psychological pressure on people, when you add the Gaza war and all those who we saw die, you can feel such despair.

"All of this combined with his financial difficulties led to this moment . . . they forced him into a corner, he was suffocating."

"They" is the Netanyahu government, which Mr Abu Jamal says intentionally pushed Palestinians to the edge with increased land grabs, settlement construction and overwhelming military force.

"Even now they are still pushing, they have yet to return the bodies of my son or his cousin. They cannot commit a crime when they are already dead, so why is the government choosing to punish us?" he asks, crying quietly, his hand covering his face.

"I believe in peace, I believe in a two-state solution but I also believe in dignity for my people, and there is no dignity here."

On the other side of the Green Line, in the Jewish neighbourhood of Har Nof, the signs of grief following the attack by Ghassan and Uday Abu Jamal are everywhere.

Large black-and-white posters line shop windows and apartment blocks asking the community to come together "to pray for and to remember the four saints who we lost" – dual Israeli-US nationals Aryeh Kopinsky, 43, Moshe Twersky, 59, Kalman Ze'ev Levine, 55, and a dual Israeli-British citizen, Avraham Shmuel Goldberg, 68.

Worshippers pour out of the Bnei Torah synagogue, where the attack occurred, while just a few doors down the street, four families tried to come to terms with their loss.

The family of Rabbi Twersky did not want to comment on the ongoing violence in Jerusalem or the government's attempts to deter future attacks. Instead, Rabbi Twersky's son, who did not want to provide his name, told Fairfax Media his family was overwhelmed by his death.

"When we heard he had died our grief was so strong, so deep, that words cannot describe," he says. But because he died in prayer, "we were comforted that he died a saint in his holiest moment".

A few doors down, the family of Rabbi Kopinsky expressed similar sentiments. His younger brother David, 40, who is also a rabbi, says it was only after Aryeh died that the family learned the scope of the kindness he had extended to his community.

"He was so loving, so kind and he made himself available to anyone . . . but he also had a fierceness in him and when the terrorists attacked the synagogue witnesses told us he fought against one of them, so we were not surprised to hear that at the end of his life he fought to save others."

When asked whether he believed punitive home demolitions could be an effective deterrent against attacks, Rabbi Kopinsky replied: "On a personal level it does not bring my brother back, it does not make my brother safe, it does not ease my family's pain.

"Will it cause another person to think back and stop before they commit an act of terror and therefore save some lives? I don't know. Maybe?"

History of a policy

Collective punishment was de rigueur before the wide-scale atrocities of the two world wars prompted the development of the Geneva Conventions, aimed at protecting those caught up in conflict.

British Collective Punishment Orders were in place in colonies from Kenya, Nigeria, Northern Rhodesia, Somaliland, Cyprus and Malaya, says academicShane Darcy, from the Irish Centre for Human Rights at the National University of Ireland, Galway.

There are also examples of collective punishment, including punitive home demolitions, in Northern Ireland in the 1920s and in Germany during World War II, Dr Darcy told Fairfax Media.

The history of Israel's home demolition policy goes back to the British Mandate in Palestine, during which it was introduced in 1945.

But unlike other countries formerly under British control, he says, Israel has not only chosen to keep the draconian law on its books but to publicly defend its active implementation despite its contravention of international law.

"Israel is the only country relying on legislation to enforce it, that gets the judicial seal of approval to enact it and openly says it is doing this kind of collective punishment.

"In the only contemporaneous example I am aware of, the Pakistani military were detaining relatives of suspected Taliban members and destroying their houses . . . but nowhere have I seen the Pakistan government claiming this is legal."

Israel makes no apology for reintroducing its much-criticised policy.

"Our security services firmly believe . . . that this does act as a deterrent," says Mr Netanyahu's spokesman, Mark Regev.

"This tool could not be used arbitrarily by the Israel police or military, it has to go through the correct process of checks and balances, often all the way up to the Israeli Supreme Court."

Israel has demolished hundreds of Palestinian homes since they began applying the policy in 1978, says Bill van Ensveld, the Israel and Palestine researcher for Human Rights Watch.

"They do not do this in the UK, or the US, or any of the other countries that Israeli likes to point to as its democratic peers," Mr van Ensveld says. "When they do this in occupied territory, it counts as a war crime.

"The idea that the family unit is very important in Palestinian society, [and] so pressure on the family will prevent potential attackers from carrying out attacks as it will result in harm to their loved ones, has no justification in international law."

Israel's judicial system offers no protection, he warns. In the long series of cases that have gone to the Supreme Court, the court has always accepted the advice of the security authorities that this extreme measure is needed.

Violence of a broken city

Enas al-Shalodi stands amid the rubble of what was once her home, describing where her family used to sit in the evenings, where her children studied, where she cooked their meals and planted herbs for their garden.

Now she and her husband Idriss and their five surviving children are homeless, their belongings scattered through several relatives' apartments, their existence fragile and lived day-by-day.

Their lives, and that of several other families, were torn apart when their 21-year-old son Abdel Rahman drove his car onto a crowded tram platform in Jerusalem, killing a three-month-old baby, Chaya Zissel Braun, a US citizen, and 22-year-old Ecuadorian woman Karen Yemima Muscara, and injuring eight others.

Shalodi was shot several times at the scene and died later in hospital. In the aftermath of the attack and his death, activists posted images of Shalodi and linked his picture with that of five-year-old Enas Khalil, a Palestinian girl who was killed by a resident of the Yitzhar settlement in the Israeli-occupied West Bank in a hit and run.

Car attacks such as these – but only those on Israelis – encouraged Mr Netanyahu to reintroduce the colonial-era policy the government had abandoned in 2005.

Back then, a military committee headed by Major-General Udi Shani found punitive home demolitions to be of "questionable effectiveness" that could result in the opposite of deterrence, describing the measure as existing only on "the verge of legality".

Not so, says Mr Regev.

"I think the truth is the policy was phased out as violence left us as we saw the end of the second intifada . . .  now that violence has returned.

"We are concerned that this is not specifically an Israel-Palestinian problem, this is a regional phenomenon, where we have got this . . . Islamic extremism, we see it in ISIS in Iraq and Syria, we see it in Libya, we see it in Yemen, we see it in Nigeria and in other countries in Africa."

As tensions escalated across Jerusalem and the West Bank in the lead-up to the recent 50-day war in Gaza, the first homes to be "punitively demolished" were those of the two Palestinian men suspected of kidnapping and killing three Israeli teenagers in June.

In a horrifying act of retaliation against a teenager who had no connection to the Israeli teens' deaths, three Israeli extremists abducted 16-year-old Palestinian Mohamed Abu Khdeir from an East Jerusalem street and burned him alive.

When Fairfax Media interviewed Mohamed Abu Khdeir's grieving parents in July, they wondered if their son's killers would ever be brought to justice and asked the question they already knew the answer to: "Will Israel order the demolition of their homes? No."

The divided city of Jerusalem is tense, nowhere more so than East Jerusalem – occupied by the Israeli military, illegally annexed by Israel in 1980, overcrowded and poorly maintained.

Palestinian families are scared to let their children play on the streets lest they meet the same fate as Mohamed Abu Khdeir.

Concrete blocks have been deployed to stop cars being driven into tram stops. Israelis are fearful of another attack and many Palestinians have given up using the tram, such is the verbal and physical abuse they endure.

In the Old City, scene of a renewed push by right-wing Jews to access the al-Aqsa compound and pray at the Temple Mount despite a long-held status quo agreement, prayer time has become a flashpoint for clashes between Palestinian worshippers and Israeli security forces.

The head of the Shin Bet intelligence service, Yoram Cohen, warned last week that the Israeli government was fuelling the fires of religious disharmony by encouraging Jews to pray at the contested site despite rabbinical objections.

But while prominent Israeli commentators and senior government officials are keen to paint this as part of a region-wide religious war, Palestinians say the cause of the upsurge in violence is far closer to home: Israel's decades-long military occupation and the fact that its ever-expanding settlement program has killed all hope of a two-state solution.