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Tuesday, July 6, 2004

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  In new fighting, Israeli troops raided the West Bank city of Nablus and a Gaza refugee camp early Tuesday. Two Palestinians, including a teenager, were killed and at least four soldiers wounded in exchanges of fire, the army and medics said.

The settlement watchdog group Peace Now said it has counted 53 outposts Israel is required to dismantle under the U.S.-backed "road map" peace plan _ or nearly twice the 28 named in a government list handed to the Americans last week.

"There is a clear-cut case of flagrant deception and a breaking of the promise to the Americans," legislator Ephraim Sneh from the Labor Party told reporters in displaying the "before" and "after" photos.

U.S. officials in Israel declined comment. However, they have publicly rebuked Israel in recent weeks, a sign of growing impatience with its handling of the outposts, seen as seeds of future settlements.

Asaf Shariv, an aide to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, said the government's list of 28 is accurate, and declined comment on the deception charge. Officials said last week that of the outposts on Israel's list, fewer than half would be removed, and others were being "legalized."

Also Monday, rabbis representing Jewish settlers accused the head of Israel's Shin Bet security service of inciting against them. The Shin Bet chief, Avi Dichter, had told the Cabinet he was concerned about growing militancy among those opposed to the government's planned evacuation of 8,000 settlers in 2005, as part of a withdrawal from Gaza and parts of the West Bank.

Some settler leaders and rabbis in the West Bank and Gaza have portrayed settlement evacuation as a crime, implying that violent resistance is justified, while insisting they are not urging settlers to break the law.

In the latest such comment, Uri Elitzur, a settler leader and former top aide to ex-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told Israel Radio on Monday that to remove someone from his soil is "worse than rape."

The heated debate dominated Israeli talk shows. The threat posed by Jewish extremists has been an issue since Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995 by an ultranationalist Jew. At the time, several rabbis were suspected -- though never convicted -- of having encouraged the assassin with their rulings.

Sharon said Monday he feels at risk. "It saddens me that one who has spent his whole life defending Jews in Israel's wars now needs to be protected from Jews out of fear that they will harm him," the Haaretz daily's web site quoted Sharon as telling members of the moderate Shinui Party, a coalition partner.

Forbids Violence

Israel's chief rabbinate said in a statement that Jewish religious law forbids settlers from using violence to resist evacuation. Israel's parliament is to hold a special debate on the issue Tuesday.

In the Nablus clash early Tuesday, Israeli troops exchanged fire with Palestinians, and the army said four soldiers were wounded, including one seriously. Witnesses said a roadside bomb went off during the incursion, killing a Palestinian man.

About a dozen Israeli tanks also drove into the Rafah refugee camp in southern Gaza, after three mortar shells hit a nearby Jewish settlement, injuring an Israeli man.

In the southern Gaza town of Khan Younis on Monday, a Palestinian teenager was shot dead by Israeli troops as he walked a few hundred yards from a Jewish settlement, Palestinian medics said. The army had no immediate comment.

And in a West Bank shootout Monday, Israeli troops killed Khaled Elhawi, the local leader of the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades in the town of Jenin, the army said.

An 18-year-old Al Aqsa gunman, who is suspected of having killed a settler in a weekend shooting ambush, was wounded and captured in Monday's battle, the army said. Al Aqsa is a violent group with ties to Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement.

In his presentation on outposts, Sneh showed reporters photos he said document the expansion in four enclaves. Photos taken in 2002 show a few mobile homes in each outpost. By 2004, they had permanent structures and paved roads.

The photos were taken by Peace Now, which said it plans to issue a new report on outpost expansion in the coming days.

Settlers began setting up outposts in 1998, to prevent the transfer of land to the Palestinians in interim peace deals. At the time, Sharon, then foreign minister, urged settlers to seize West Bank hilltops.

The road map plan, launched last year, requires Israel to dismantle outposts established after March 2001, when Sharon became prime minister. According to Peace Now, 53 outposts fall in that category, and another 44 were established before the cutoff date. The road map never got off the ground, with both Israel and the Palestinians failing to fulfill their obligations.

Israel has dismantled a few outposts, most of them uninhabited. Peace Now estimates that about 1,500 settlers live in the enclaves.

Sneh, a former military governor of the West Bank, said the government has been channeling funds to the outposts it had promised to dismantle. He noted it would be impossible to pave roads without government blessing, and said that much of the expansion occurred in the past year, after Israel accepted the road map.

Israel's state comptroller reported in May the Housing Ministry funneled nearly $6.5 million to illegal settlement construction in the West Bank between January 2000 to June 2003, more than half of it to outposts.

"There is no sign that anything has changed, before or after the road map," said Peace Now spokesman Dror Etkes. He said five outposts were established after the launch of the road map, which envisions a Palestinian state by 2005.

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