TEL AVIV, Aug 13: The Israeli supreme court on Tuesday stayed an order to deport three relatives of wanted Palestinian militants from the West Bank pending a legal review of the controversial measure.

An army tribunal had ordered the three banished to the Gaza Strip in a new crackdown on the families of suspected militants aimed at deterring Palestinian suicide bombings and other attacks on civilians.

But after appeals filed by Kifah Adjuri, 28, his sister Intissar, 34, and Abdel Nasser Assidi, 34, the supreme court stayed the orders and gave the army two weeks to justify its action, court sources said.

“We are happy that the court did not fall for the collective hysteria and automatically approve an act of collective punishment that strikes people whose only crime is to be relatives of supects,” said Lea Tsemel, an attorney for the three.

The Adjuris are the brother and sister of Ali Adjuri, a local West Bank chief of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed group linked to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement.

Ali Adjuri, killed by Israeli soldiers on Aug 6 near the West Bank town of Jenin, was accused of organizing a double suicide bombing that killed five other people in Tel Aviv on July 17.

Assidi’s brother is a member of the armed wing of the Hamas wanted by Israeli security forces for a July 16 bus ambush near a West Bank settlement that left nine people dead.

A minister from Israel’s right-wing dominated government blasted the court’s ruling.

“I deeply regret that the expulsions have not been applied due to the court’s order because expulsions can dissuade terrorists from carrying out suicide operations,” said Danny Naveh, a minister without portfolio from Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s hawkish Likud party.

The expulsions had been ordered on Monday by a military court in the West Bank settlement of Beit El, near Ramallah, and were appealed to the high court by The Center of the Defense of the Individual, an Israeli rights group.—AFP