JERUSALEM, 25 September 2004 — Israel is building its wall on West Bank land not to keep out bombers but to grab the land and put pressure on Palestinians to move away, a UN human rights investigator said yesterday.
“There is no compelling evidence that bombers could not have been as effectively prevented from entering Israel if the wall had been built along the Green Line — the accepted border between Israel and Palestine — or within the Israeli side of the Green Line,” John Dugard said in a report to the UN General Assembly in New York.
“The course of the wall clearly indicates that its purpose is to incorporate as many settlers as possible into Israel,” said Dugard, a South African law professor charged with monitoring the Palestinian territories by the Geneva-based UN Commission on Human Rights.
“This is borne out by the fact that some 80 percent of settlers in the West Bank will be included on the Israeli side of the wall,” he said.
Palestinians have portrayed the wall as a land grab aimed at dashing their hopes for statehood.
Meanwhile, an Israeli woman was killed in a Palestinian mortar strike yesterday on a Jewish settlement in Gaza, as Israel prepared to mark Judaism’s most solemn day of Yom Kippur amid fears of bombings.
The attack was slammed by a close aide to Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon who accused the Palestinians of wanting to hinder a planned withdrawal from the Gaza Strip next year. “A woman was killed by a mortar shell that landed on her house in the Neve Dekalim settlement” in the southern Gaza Strip, an Israeli army spokesman told AFP, without giving the victim’s name.
He said the mortars were fired from the nearby Palestinian town of Khan Yunis.
Local media named the victim as 24-year-old Tiferet Tratner, a Jerusalem resident on a visit to the settlement.
Mortars were also fired at the Morag settlement, likewise in southern Gaza, without causing any casualties.
Palestinian security sources said Israeli tanks fired on Khan Yunis in a swift apparent reprisal for the attacks, both of which were claimed by the Islamic Jihad and its larger rival Hamas in telephone calls to AFP.
The attack came as Israel was still reeling from a deadly militant infiltration into Morag on Thursday that left three Israeli soldiers dead as well as the three Palestinian assailants.
Israeli police were placed on high alert yesterday morning, less than a day after troops arrested four Palestinians, including a 15-year-old boy, allegedly on their way to carry out attacks in the Jewish state.
The daily Haaretz said Israel’s internal security services, Shin Beth, had received no less than 40 warning of attacks for the 24-hour Yom Kippur holiday starting at sunset yesterday. Shops were to shut down and all motorized traffic come to a complete halt until this evening.
Security guards and several thousand police, backed up by volunteers, were deployed in and around cities, especially market places where last-minute shoppers prepared for the holiday. Additional forces were posted at synagogues and cemeteries, where thousands were expected to pay homage to fellow-citizens.
