Steve Quayle News Alerts

June 16, 2002

SALEM JUNCTION, Israel — Israel was to start work Sunday on a fence designed to keep Palestinian attackers from crossing into Israel from the West Bank.

Palestinians and right-wing Israelis strongly oppose plans for a 75-mile electronic fence that stretching south from near Afula in northern Israel to a point northeast of Tel Aviv.

Right-wing Israeli politicians fear that what is being billed as a temporary ``security fence'' will evolve into a permanent border with a future Palestinian state, leaving most of the 200,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank on the far side.

Several ministers raised objections at a Cabinet meeting Sunday. Work on the fence will go ahead for now, and the smaller security Cabinet will take up the issue Wednesday, Shaul Simchon, the agriculture minister, told Israel Radio.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, an ardent support of Israeli settlement expansion for decades, long opposed the barrier but reluctantly gave his approval this month.

Of the nearly 70 suicide bombings in Israel over the past 20 months, all have been launched from the West Bank, which has no barrier separating it from Israel.

Militant groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which have carried out many of the bombings, are stronger in the Gaza Strip than in the West Bank. But no suicide bombers have come from Gaza, which is fenced in.

Palestinians object to the barrier because they believe it is part of a secret Israeli plan to carve up the West Bank.

The fence will largely follow the so-called Green Line, which was the effective Israeli border before Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 Mideast war. But parts of the fence will veer into the West Bank to bring some settlements close to the border onto the Israeli side.

Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer says Israel has no choice but to erect the barrier, but calls it temporary.

The fence is to be part of a system of defensive measures to prevent suicide bombers and gunmen from launching attacks from towns near the border.

``It won't be only a fence,'' Amos Yaron, director general of the defense ministry, told Israel Radio. There will be patrols and observation posts, with the army and border police keeping watch, he said. The fence will be electronic, with sensors that detect any attempt to cut through or climb over the barrier.

Over the past year, Israel has erected segments of a fence and placed other barriers along small parts of the West Bank. The new fence is intended to replace this piecemeal approach.

Although it will not run the entire length of the West Bank, it will separate Israel from the northern West Bank towns of Jenin, Nablus, Tulkarem and Qalqiliya, the source of the majority of suicide bombings.

In addition, Israel is already building a fence and trenches around east Jerusalem to control the flow of Palestinians into the city from the West Bank. Israel claims all of Jerusalem as its capital, while Palestinians seek the eastern sector, which Israel occupied in 1967, for a future capital.

In other developments, Hamas claimed responsibility for a Saturday night firefight that left two Israeli soldiers and one Palestinian gunmen dead in the Gaza Strip.

Soldiers on patrol in the northern Gaza Strip near the Jewish settlement of Dugit encountered armed Palestinians, the Israeli military said in a statement. Four Israeli soldiers were also wounded, the statement added.

Meanwhile, Palestinian officials were dismissive of a plan reportedly under consideration by the Bush administration to create a provisional Palestinian state.

Bush has not announced his plan but is expected to address the issue this week. Media reports have said the proposal could offer the Palestinians limited sovereignty on the approximately 40 percent of West Bank and the two-thirds of the Gaza Strip already under full or partial Palestinian autonomy.

Israeli media reported that Sharon told the Cabinet he opposes such a plan because conditions are not yet ripe for any Palestinian state.

However, the Palestinians are calling for a firm timetable to establish a permanent state on all of the West Bank and Gaza, along with east Jerusalem. Israel firmly opposes a handover of all of those territories.

Palestinian Cabinet Minister Saeb Erekat said provisional states simply don't exist in international relations and that Bush should focus on other angles.

``A state is about power, about sovereignty,'' Erekat said, noting the Palestinians had declared statehood in 1988 — a symbolic move never recognized internationally. ``It's time for this state to exercise its full sovereignty, its full independence.

Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres has noted the provisional statehood idea was similar to what he and Palestinian Parliament speaker Ahmed Qureia had worked out earlier this year in an attempt to end the violence. Their efforts, outlined in February, were met with skepticism and so far have gone nowhere.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,55405,00.html