OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, 18 November 2002 — Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon regards the Hebron Agreement of 1997 between Israelis and Palestinians as no longer relevant, the Israeli news agency Y-Net reported yesterday. “Today is clear that the Hebron Protocol is void. It is not being adhered to anyway and has no significance,” he was reported as saying during his weekly Cabinet meeting.

Sharon reportedly made his comment in response to the demand by one of his Cabinet Minister Nathan Sharansky to nullify the agreement signed by then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Yasser Arafat in 1997 to regulate the administration of Hebron, where about 400 Jewish settlers live amidst 130,000 Palestinians.

The protocol stipulated a withdrawal of Israeli troops from the city and decreed that 80 percent of the city would be under Palestinian rule and the remaining 20 percent under Israeli administration. Netanyahu was reported to have said that, “all the accords agreed by Israel have been annulled by Arafat.”

Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz said at the government meeting that the Israeli Army had completely reoccupied Hebron, the Israeli broadcasting network reported. The reoccupation took place in response to Friday’s attack by Palestinian snipers on Israeli soldiers who were guarding a group of Jewish settlers. Twelve Israelis and three extremists died in the exchange of fire.

Sharon also said yesterday that Israel must enlarge the zone it administers in Hebron. A day after Israeli forces swarmed back into the Palestinian-administered areas of the flash point city which it had quit just weeks ago, Jewish settlers started doing just that, establishing an outpost between the settlement of Kiryat Arba and the Jewish enclave in the city itself, a settler leader said.

Sharon said during a tour of the city that the army “must ensure territorial continuity” between Kiryat Arba on the eastern edge of Hebron and Jewish enclaves in the city center around a disputed shrine.

At the same time, Hebron’s settler leader, Zvi Katsover, said dozens of youths had already moved in to set up a wildcat outpost — the basis for a future settlement — between the two. “We have created a new settlement outpost, and it would have been a historic sin not to have made use of this occasion,” said Katsover, referring to the Islamic Jihad attack on Friday night.

“We have to cleanse the ground to ensure an Israeli territorial continuity between Kiryat Arba and Hebron,” he said at the funeral of the three settler security guards in Jerusalem. It was seen as an implicit threat that Palestinians living in the stretch between the settlement and the enclave would be forced from their homes.

Katsover said the project involves building 1,000 housing units in the area. “I trust Sharon” to implement the project, he said. The new moves set alarm bells ringing among Palestinian officials.

Hebron’s Palestinian mayor, Mustafa Al-Natsheh, said the announcement was “part of an old Israeli plan which was immediately implemented after the 1967 war” with its Arab neighbors, when the Jewish state seized the West Bank from Jordan. “They use every incident to increase the implementation of their plan,” Natsheh told reporters. “Their aim is to force the Palestinians out and bring in more Jews.”

Just hours after the attack, Israeli armored vehicles piled back into Palestinian-administered zones of the city. Israel has always assured the administration of Palestinian neighborhoods which lie on the edge of the heavily-guarded Jewish enclaves in the city center where some 600 hard-line settlers live.

But after two years of bitter conflict with the Palestinians, Israel’s extreme right-wing government says the 1993 autonomy accords which laid down the division of Hebron are dead. Since Israel’s national unity coalition collapsed last month after the center-left Labour Party walked out, there have been increasing calls for a tougher response to Palestinian attacks.

But Sharon is wary of incurring US anger by stirring up tensions in the region as Washington piles pressure on Iraq. Netanyahu, however, has wooed the powerful extreme right wing of the two men’s Likud party by calling for Arafat to be expelled. Israel blames Arafat — a virtual prisoner in his Ramallah offices, where he has been pinned down for almost a year — for failing to crack down on Palestinian activists, including Islamic Jihad, which claimed Friday’s ambush in Hebron.

Netanyahu promised further tough measures in Hebron, which along with the rest of the West Bank was reoccupied by the army in June after a spate of suicide bombings. “We are going to cleanse the whole area and do the work ourselves,” he said.

Israeli forces also reoccupied the center of the northern West Bank city of Nablus after the kibbutz attack last week, carrying out extended operations based on a two-week search of Jenin that led to the slaying of an Islamic Jihad leader on Nov. 9.

Meanwhile according to reports, an Israeli rabbi with thousands of followers said during a prayer meeting in the settlement in Kiryat Arba on Saturday that “halacha”, or Jewish religious law, “essentially supported the annihilation of non-Jews in Israel.” Rav Leor said most rabbinic authorities “of the past and the present accepted the opinion that the lives of non-Jews don’t’ enjoy the same sanctity as the lives of Jews.”

“Hashmadat goyem” (the extermination of non-Jews),” he said was an established principle in Jewish theology. The rabbi is affiliated with the messianic Jewish movement known as Gush Emunim which is represented in the Israeli Knesset by seven Knesset members.

A member of the Islamic Jihad was shot dead by Israeli soldiers in a village near Tulkarm, in the northern West Bank, Palestinian witnesses said last night. They said Mohammed Abdel Ghani, 22, was killed when troops moved into Saidah village, about 10 kilometers north of Tulkarm, and surrounded his family’s house to capture his brother. His brother, Riyad Abdel Ghani, 30, a member of the secular Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades group, linked to Arafat’s Fatah political grouping, escaped the raid, they said. Another one of his brother’s Imad Abdel Ghani was wounded in the legs by the soldiers, they said.