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Ben Eliezer Claims “Illegal” Colonial Settlement Will Be Removed
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| A young Israeli boy holds a sign during a right-wing demo in front of Sharon’s office protesting Ben-Eliezer's
announcement
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OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, June 30 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer has ordered the army to dismantle by Sunday 10 what he called “illegally set up” Jewish outposts in the West Bank, Israel army radio reported Saturday, June 29.
"Afterwards I intend to get rid of the others," he told delegates at a meeting of his Labor party's youth committee in Jerusalem.
Earlier in the week, Ben Eliezer had promised a government committee he would deal with the issue of up to 20 illegal outposts in the near future, without identifying which wildcat settlements he was referring to.
About 200 Jewish colonial settlements have been set up in the West Bank and Gaza Strip since Israel seized the territories in the 1967 Middle East war. All the settlements, according to U.N. resolutions are considered illegal. Some 60 so-called "rogue" outposts, often just a cluster of caravans, have popped up in recent years.
The settlers believe that they have a biblical right to the land and condemned Ben Eliezer’s move.
According to a report issued Sunday, June 30, by Israeli peace group “Peace Now”, ever since Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon came into power in February 2001, Jewish settlers in the West Bank have built 44 new sites.
“Nine of these new sites were erected in the period March-June 2002," the Peace Now report said. It added that "the term 'outposts' is misleading. To all intents and purposes these sites are new settlements: they have independent infrastructures and are spread over new pieces of land."
Peace Now spokesman Tzali Reshef said in a statement that the Israeli government "is systematically violating its commitment to the Israeli public as written in the coalition agreement that formed the basis for the national unity government."
It said that Ben Eliezer's claims to have already dismantled a number of sites in the Palestinian territories were "spurious" and that any sites which had been shut down had been rebuilt.
"It is shameful that the defense ministry continues to speak of taking down settlements when every day a new one crops up," Reshef said.
"The creation of new settlements harms Israel's security and unnecessarily endangers still more [Israeli] soldiers and citizens," he added.
For more than thirty years, the creation of Jewish settlements has been a central component of Israel's effort to consolidate control over the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
Israeli settlement construction has served not only to facilitate territorial acquisition and to justify the continuing presence of Israeli armed forces on Palestinian lands, but also to limit the territorial contiguity of areas populated by Palestinians and thereby to preclude the establishment of a viable independent Palestinian state.
Israel's settlement policy and practices clearly contravene international law. Article 49, paragraph 6 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states that "the occupying power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territories it occupies." Moreover, the confiscation of land for settlement construction is in violation of the rules contained in the 1907 Hague Regulations protecting public and private property in occupied territory.
Settlement activity is also fundamentally incompatible with the concept of a "just and lasting peace" called for in United Nations Security Council Resolution 242. In Resolution 465, which was unanimously adopted, the Security Council made clear that "Israel's policy and practices of settling parts of its population and new immigrants" in the occupied territories not only violate the Fourth Geneva Convention, but also constitute "a serious obstruction to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East."
The Security Council called upon Israel to "dismantle the existing settlements and in particular to cease, on an urgent basis, the establishment, construction of planning of settlements in the Arab territories occupied since 1967, including Jerusalem."
A detailed new map of the West Bank published Monday, May 13, shows that Israeli settlers exert control over nearly half of Palestinian territories through a strategic placement of a few Jewish colonial settlements.
The study, released by the B'Tselem center for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, was based on previously unpublished documents collected from Israeli municipal officials over the past nine months.
It shows that the Jewish settlements themselves occupy 1.7 percent of the West Bank territory, where Palestinians want to create their own state.
But through a controversial policy overseen by the defense ministry,
Israel has also set up special buffer zones around the settlements from which Palestinians are barred -- and where new colonial settlements may be established.
These zones make up 41.9 percent of the West Bank's territory according to the B'Tselem survey. They further splinter the West Bank into segments and isolate major Palestinian towns.
"This is not a coincidence – this is the intended government policy," said B'Tselem executive director Jessica Montell.
The B'Tselem study shows the settlement population doubling since the 1993 Oslo accords that established the Palestinian Authority, reaching some 380,000 people.
"The location of these settlements impedes the creation of territorial continuity of the Palestinian state," said the study's author, Yehezkel Lein.
"This makes it impossible to establish a Palestinian state that has anything resembling a viable economy."
Lein said many of the settlements have been set up near strategic roads which are then ruled off-limits to Palestinians, forcing them to take extended detours for the shortest trips.
The rights group stressed that Israel's offer in 2000 to return nearly all of the territory into Palestinian hands was "meaningless" if the region remained broken down into islands that were not linked by roads.
"Ceding 97 percent of the territory is meaningless unless we know which 97 percent we are talking about," Montell said.
On another note, Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot said Sunday that Israel is to dismantle the liaison offices with the Palestinians set up in the West Bank and Gaza Strip under the 1993 autonomy accords, AFP reported.
It said the dismantling of the last vestiges of security cooperation between Israel and the Palestinians showed that Israel's aim was to take sole responsibility for security in the Palestinian territories.
At a later state, Israel would also take charge of affairs of civilian administration in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, according to the paper.
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