OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, 17 February 2004 — Israeli policies have pushed many Palestinians out of parts of the West Bank city of Hebron, an official of an international monitoring group based in the city said yesterday.

Roar Sorensen of the Temporary International Presence in Hebron, said difficult conditions in the area of the city under Israeli control had led to an exodus, but he did not know how many have left.

The Israeli human rights group “B’tselem” estimates that as many as 15,000 of its 35,000 Palestinian residents have left the Israeli-controlled zone, where about 500 Jewish settlers live in three enclaves. Altogether, about 130,000 Palestinians live in Hebron.

Also yesterday, a majority of lawmakers, including three ministers, voted in favor a no-confidence motion in Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s government, underlining the level of opposition even inside the government to a plan to dismantle some Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza.

The vote in favor of the motion was 53-45. It was the third week in a row that Sharon’s coalition was unable to muster a simple majority to vote down such motions. Though embarrassing, Sharon’s center-right team survived because an absolute majority of 61 out of the 120 votes in Parliament is required to bring down a government.

Addressing Parliament, Sharon called on his coalition partners — and the opposition — to support his policies.

Sharon’s Palestinian counterpart, Ahmed Qorei, meanwhile took his campaign against Israel’s West Bank wall to Germany, where he warned that the project was leaving no room for a Palestinian state.

After talks with German President Johannes Rau, he said they had discussed “what dangers the wall represents... and that if it continues to be built it will leave no room for the creation of a Palestinian state”.

Meanwhile, the anti-settlements watchdog Peace Now said it had compiled a report showing a record number of settlement outposts had been approved as official settlements by the government last year even though Sharon pledged to tear down all such outposts as part of the road map.

“The main thing that we saw in the last year was that most of the outposts became permanent settlements, communities connected (by the authorities) with water and electricity,” said Peace Now’s Yaariv Oppenheimer.

In events on the ground, a Palestinian was shot dead yesterday by Israelis in the Rafah area of Gaza Strip while a Palestinian wounded on Feb. 11 succumbed to his wounds.