OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, 26 June — The Israeli government faced criticism yesterday over plans to build 300 new homes in the occupied Golan Heights despite international calls to freeze settlement building to boost Middle East peace hopes.
Officials at the Israeli Housing Ministry said it had announced a tender for building 100 houses and 200 vacation bungalows in the Golan Heights, land which Israel seized from Syria in the Middle East war in 1967. A ministry official said the new homes would be built inside the Kela Alon settlement in an area near the borders with Syria and Lebanon.
This would be what it called in line with the government’s policy of expanding existing settlements but not building any new ones. “It’s within the settlement,” a ministry source said. Moshe Raz, a member of Israel’s parliament and a vocal opponent of settlements, said he had studied a map showing where the new homes would be built and he believed they would amount to a new settlement.
“I saw the map they published, and on this map they included everything, including Lebanon, but they didn’t show this settlement Kela Alon,” Raz told Reuters by telephone. The controversy erupted as the hawkish Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon began a visit to the United States, where he will meet President George W. Bush to discuss efforts to bring peace to the Middle East after almost nine months of Israeli-Palestinian violence.
Washington hopes a shaky US-brokered cease-fire will hold and Israel and the Palestinians will move on to the next stage of peacemaking, outlined in proposals by an international committee headed by former US Sen. George Mitchell.
Meanwhile, Islamic countries met in the West African state of Mali yesterday with the Palestinian uprising at the top of the agenda but little sign of new options for putting pressure on Israel.
“This conference opens at a moment when the situation in the Middle East, far from witnessing a respite, is actually getting worse,” said Malian Prime Minister Mande Sidibe, addressing Organization of the Islamic Conference foreign ministers in Bamako.
The ministers and hundreds of other delegates began their annual meeting a month after an emergency debate agreed that members would end political links with Israel.
Since last month’s emergency meeting in Qatar there has been little sign of movement on cutting ties from members that had not already downgraded relations.
“We hope that this 28th conference will further reinforce the position of support and solidarity in the face of the conflict,” said the Palestinian Ambassador in Bamako, Abderramin Abourabah. “The intifada ... must without fail result in the birth of an independent and sovereign Palestinian state,” said Sidibe.
