JERUSALEM, 27 June 2005 — US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has turned up the pressure on Israel to stop expanding West Bank settlements, cautioning in her recent visit that Washington wouldn’t accept new construction, Israeli officials said yesterday. The US Embassy and Israeli Foreign Ministry refused to comment.
But the scolding meshes with US President George W. Bush’s criticism of settlement expansion after meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas last month.
Israeli officials present at last week’s meeting where Rice criticized Israel’s settlement expansion said she did not threaten any particular penalty. But they said she was displeased by construction she saw when traveling from Jerusalem to the West Bank town of Ramallah for meetings with Palestinian leaders. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of their positions.
Israel continues to build in its largest settlement, Maaleh Adumim, and other established West Bank communities, and to expropriate Palestinian land in annexed east Jerusalem, which the Palestinians claim as capital of a future state. Israeli officials said Rice said the US wouldn’t be coerced to accept new facts on the ground that Israel is creating in its effort to influence a final peace deal. Israel has to stop the settlement expansion before it becomes a problem, the officials cited her as saying.
Jewish settlers scuffled yesterday with Israeli soldiers sent to demolish abandoned buildings the army fears could be used as redoubts to fight the planned withdrawal from Gaza. The confrontation stoked fears of violence when Israel tries to remove settlers from the occupied Gaza Strip and part of the West Bank this August under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s plan for “disengagement” from conflict with the Palestinians.
Some lying in front of the bulldozers, some climbing atop them, young ultranationalists tried to halt the demolition of derelict beachfront bungalows — a few of which were being refurbished as homes for incoming opponents of the withdrawal. Authorities fear that an influx of supporters into settler enclaves could make evacuations more difficult and increase the chance of violence.
Meanwhile, fighters from the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades staged a show of force in the West Bank yesterday, vowing to oppose any attempt to disarm them as they marked the first anniversary of their leader’s killing. Around 200 gunmen fired their rifles into the air during the rally in the center of Nablus, a year to the day after Israeli troops killed the group’s West Bank chief Nayef Abu Sharekh and six other militants in the northern city.
“Our guns are weapons of resistance. We will not surrender them to anyone, under any conditions,” one masked Brigades commander told the crowds which included around 500 civilians, an AFP correspondent reported.
