Israel keeps building in West Bank settlement blocs: report (Roundup)

Feb 21, 2007, 15:31 GMT

Tel Aviv - Israel is currently building more than 3,000 new apartments in existing Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, with construction of 1,000 of them started in 2006, a report published Wednesday by Peace Now said.

The number of settlements or settler outposts however did not grow, the annual report by the Israeli settlement watchdog said.

Most of the construction is taking place in settlements around Jerusalem and near the 'green line,' the armistice line marking the West Bank's border with Israel,

Israel wants to keep these settlements, located behind its controversial West Bank barrier, as part of a future peace deal with the Palestinians, and has made no secret of the fact that it is continuing to expand them.

These include Ma'aleh Adumim, directly east of Jerusalem, the Gush Etzion bloc to the south, Givat Ze'ev to the north of the city, and also Beitar Ilit, Modi'in Ilit and Alfei Menashe along the green line.

Three other settlements - Ariel and nearby Kidumim and Karnei Shomron - are located in the heart of the northern West Bank. Israel wants to incorporate these behind its barrier by creating a finger- shaped enclave poking eastwards, near the city of Qalqiliya.

The Jewish population in the West Bank grew by 5 per cent in 2006, to 268,000 settlers, who live among some 3.8 million Palestinians.

The figures show that 'this government, which is supposedly a moderate government, did not change anything with regard to its settlement policy,' charged Peace Now spokesman Yariv Oppenheimer.

'The situation on the ground will make it very difficult to divide the territory and reach a two-state solution,' he told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

Israel began building settlements in the West Bank shortly after capturing the territory from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East war. The international community regards the settlements as illegal and Palestinians demand they all be uprooted in any future peace deal.

In the northern West Bank, meanwhile, Israeli undercover troops shot dead early Wednesday morning the Jenin head of the Islamic Jihad, said to have equipped a suicide bomber and sent him to Tel Aviv.

Israeli police nabbed the would-be bomber in Tel Aviv on Tuesday night. Hours later, a mixed force of undercover soldiers of the Israel Defence Force (IDF) and border policemen killed 25-year-old Mahmoud Ibrahim Obeid, who is known in Jenin by his nom de guerre Abu Jaheem.

An IDF spokesman said Obeid had featured prominently on the IDF's wanted list for two years.

The captured suicide bomber had told his interrogators that he had been recruited by Obeid, Israeli reports said, and the Islamic Jihad confirmed it had sent him on his mission.

The would-be bomber and his accomplices were arrested in an apartment in Bat Yam, south of Tel Aviv, Tuesday night, after a massive man-hunt sparked by intelligence reports that a suicide bomber was on the loose in the area.

He led investigators to a garbage can in the city of Rishon LeZion, some distance further south, where he had hidden his bomb.

Police sappers detonated the device in a controlled explosion, after first evacuating dozens of nearby buildings.

The bomber said he had been ordered to blow himself up in south Tel Aviv. Israeli media reported Wednesday morning that his likely target was the teeming, multi-storied, Tel Aviv central bus station.

Islamic Jihad took responsibility for the last successful suicide bombing in Israel on January 29, which killed three people in Eilat, Israel's southernmost city on the tip of the Gulf of Aqaba.

Israeli authorities suspect that the bomber who carried out the Eilat attack slipped over the border from Egypt.

On Wednesday Egyptian police arrested a Palestinian with an explosive belt who said he had tunnelled under the border with the Gaza Strip and was on his way to attack Israeli tourists in the Sinai.