JERUSALEM, 3 July 2004 — Israel will review “every kilometer” of the 500-kilometer stretch of West Bank wall not yet built to check whether Palestinian rights and international law are being violated, an Israeli official said yesterday.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on Thursday was quoted as saying he would be prepared to move the separation wall closer to Israel, wherever possible, to avoid trapping Palestinians in fenced-in enclaves.
The promise of a review came in response to a Supreme Court ruling earlier this week that most of a 40-kilometer segment of wall near Jerusalem must be rerouted because it would have caused too much hardship to Palestinians.
The wall, a complex of fences, walls, barbed wire and trenches, will eventually cut off the entire West Bank from Israel, at a length of 680 kilometers. One fourth has been built. Palestinians contend that the wall amounts to a land grab, and that Israel should have built it on its territory, not in the West Bank.
The wall is a key element of Sharon’s plan of “unilateral disengagement” from the Palestinians, which also includes a withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and four small West Bank settlements by September 2005.
In new violence yesterday, Israeli soldiers killed three Palestinians, all unarmed according to witnesses, in separate Gaza clashes. A fourth Palestinian, a 15-year-old boy, died of wounds he sustained in an Israeli missile strike on Thursday.
Also yesterday, Palestinians fired three homemade rockets toward the border town of Sderot. One fell in town, causing no injuries, and the other two hit open fields. In response to rocket barrages earlier this week, Israel reoccupied large parts of northern Gaza, and officials said troops would remain for months.
In the West Bank town of Qabatiya, Palestinians killed a man with a burst of automatic fire in a public square after accusing him of collaborating with Israel and sexually abusing his two young daughters.
A lynch mob of about 500 people cheered on the gunmen from the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, a group linked to Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement. Before being killed, the man was on his knees, his head bowed, according to footage shown on Israeli TV stations. Israel’s Shin Bet security has recruited a wide network of Palestinian informers, through payments or blackmail, and dozens have been killed by Palestinians in nearly four years of fighting. Public killings remain relatively rare.
Elsewhere in the West Bank, three Al-Aqsa members from the West Bank city of Nablus were arrested on suspicion they were planning to carry out a suicide bombing in Jerusalem yesterday. One of the detainees carried a 12-kilo explosives belt ready for detonation, security officials said.
