JERUSALEM, 18 June 2005 — Israel plans to build a barrier that will extend out to sea from its border with Gaza to deter Palestinian infiltrators once it withdraws from the coastal strip in August, military officials said yesterday. Details were reported in the Jerusalem Post, which said the barrier, part concrete and part floating fence, would stretch 950 meters into the Mediterranean from Israel’s boundary with the northern Gaza Strip.
The Palestinian Authority reacted angrily to the plan. “I hope the Israeli government will stop the mentality of walls,” chief negotiator Saeb Erekat told Reuters. “There is a wall on the ground, now a wall on the water and tomorrow we will end up with wall in the sky. It will not bring peace and security.”
Israel has surrounded Gaza, home to 1.3 million Palestinians, with an electronic fence that it says keeps out attackers but which Palestinians condemn for restricting their movements. Israel is also erecting a West Bank land wall that will eventually extend 600 km, cutting into occupied territory in some places.
The Jerusalem Post said the first 150 meters of the sea wall would consist of concrete pilings burrowed into the seabed while the remaining 800 meters would be a submerged 1.8 meter deep “floating fence”. No further details were given. A military official said the wall was being built in part to compensate for Israel’s future loss of surveillance posts and would involve a system of electronic sensors and radar.
Israel also wants to use US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s weekend visit to try to stem the growing political and diplomatic clout of its archfoe, the Palestinian militant group Hamas, political sources said. Israeli leaders are increasingly worried about the Islamist faction’s successes in local Palestinian elections, its recent contacts with European Union diplomats and the threat of renewed militant attacks that could disrupt Israel’s Gaza withdrawal.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon may even ask Rice to pressure Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to bar Hamas from running in coming parliamentary elections, a Sharon confidant said. Rice is unlikely to comply with such a request, which would be seen widely as interference in internal Palestinian affairs, even though Hamas remains sworn to Israel’s destruction and is on a US list of terrorist organizations.
But Sharon will stress his opposition to Abbas’ strategy of talking to militants instead of confronting them, and hopes to convince Rice to urge the EU to reinstate a ban on contacts with Hamas, which the bloc also classifies as a terrorist group.
