OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, Sept 7 (IslamOnline & News Agencies)- In another extremist move, hawkish Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ruled out Saturday dismantling any Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, even rogue ones, saying Palestinians would see it as a sign of weakness, news agencies reported.

“Any debate on dismantling the settlements would be wrong, because it could give an impression of weakness" to Palestinians, the hardline premier told Israeli public radio, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).

The issue "will not be touched upon until discussions on a final settlement," he insisted. The hardline prime minister declined even to back his defense minister's pledge to eradicate rogue outposts in the West Bank that have been erected without government authorization.

"What is legal is legal, what is not is not," was all Sharon would say when challenged about the wildcat settlements which have mushroomed since he took over the premiership in March 2001.

Israeli Defence Minister Benyamin Ben Eliezer vowed in June to dismantle 19 rogue West Bank outposts, which peace activists say are costing the Israeli army and taxpayer a fortune in men and resources to protect.

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, 2002, 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.

In a study released on July 24 by Peace Now, most Jewish settlers in the occupied Palestinian territories said that they would quit illegal Israeli settlements if the government ordered them out and offered financial compensation.

The survey found that 68% of settlers "recognize the authority of the democratic institutions of the country to decide on a withdrawal from the settlements and will conform to such a decision," said AFP.

The survey, unprecedented in its scope and depth, was supervised by an academic committee of professors from Tel Aviv University and conducted by the Hopp Research company on 3,200 households, in every settlement numbering 150 inhabitants and in most of the smaller ones.

Peace Now stressed that the level of willingness to leave among the people surveyed suggests that settlements are not immovable and that the main obstacle to peace is hardline Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's government.

"The settlers, with the exception of a very small extremist minority, will not be an obstacle to a peace agreement," Peace Now said, adding that views expressed by the Council of Settlers were not representative.

On July 14, Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz said that some of the illegal Israeli settlements built on the Gaza Strip have a population of two or three families.

“How many Israelis know that some of the Gaza Strip settlements have a population of two or three families? Probably not even the members of the Knesset and the majority of the army’s senior officer corps are aware of this fact,” reported Ha’aretz newspaper.

Earlier in July, news agencies reported that the British Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) ordered an end to Israeli goods produced in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Golan Heights being labeled "Produce of Israel", clearly differentiating, for the first time, between Israel and the occupied territories.

Ha’aretz reported that a letter sent out by David Holliday, chief horticultural marketing inspector to "all interested parties," said "advice from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Department of Trade and Industry is that produce from these occupied territories ought not be labeled as `Produce of Israel,' because these territories are not recognized as part of Israel."

The British move is largely symbolic, as the value of exports from the settlements to the whole of the EU amounts to £13 millions.

The European Union (EU) stiffened its rules of origin, which means goods from the settlements will be subject to customs duty, unlike exports from Israel.

On Friday, Sharon declared that for Israel, the 1993 Oslo peace accords with the Palestinians no longer exist.

Speaking to the Israeli daily newspaper Maariv to mark the Jewish New Year, Sharon said the same fate had befallen the offers made by his predecessor Ehud Barak at talks in Camp David in the United States and Taba in Egypt in 2000, said AFP.