OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, 10 February 2004 — Israeli state attorneys told the Supreme Court yesterday the route of a wall which cuts deep into the occupied West Bank would probably be revised to ease Palestinian hardship.
There was no immediate indication at the end of the two-hour Supreme Court session when the judges would rule in the appeals by two Israeli civil rights groups ahead of World Court deliberations on the same issue later this month. “The fence route will probably be moved, and a change of policy in the seam-line area is being considered in order to ease as much as the possible the lives of the Palestinians living in it,” Michael Blass, a state attorney, told the court.
He was referring to West Bank territory, where completed sections of the wall have restricted Palestinians’ access to fields, schools and neighboring villages.
Hamoked Center for the Defense of the Individual and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel petitioned the court to declare illegal the planned route of the wall looping deep into the West Bank to encircle Jewish settlements.
The petitioners pursued the case despite earlier signals from Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s office that Israel intends to shorten the route, making it follow the pre-1967 war boundary with the West Bank more closely in a bid to secure US support.
Parliamentary allies opposed to Sharon’s plan to evacuate Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip, occupied at the same time as the West Bank, dealt him an embarrassing blow when they abstained from a confidence motion. He survived the second confidence vote in a week with only a few more votes than the opposition in the 120-member Knesset.
In a separate challenge to Israel, Palestinian leaders were considering whether to declare a state unilaterally in the West Bank and Gaza to counter an Israeli threat of go-it-alone disengagement steps, a senior Palestinian official said.
Sharon has said his drawing of a new “security line” in the West Bank and Gaza, should Israel decide further peace efforts were futile, would leave the Palestinians with less land than they have been seeking for a state. “This is one of the options that are being studied in response to Sharon’s unilateral plan and to try to foil it,” said the official, Yasser Abed Rabbo.
Unilateral moves by either side would leave a US-backed peace road map in tatters. The road map calls for an end to violence, mutual confidence-building steps and negotiations leading to creation of a Palestinian state by 2005.
Sharon was to undergo a hospital procedure later in the day to remove stones in his urinary tract. His office said he would be sent home the same evening after surgeons use ultrasonic waves to pulverize the stones.
