JERUSALEM, 30 July 2004 — A new route for Israel’s West Bank wall will bring it closer to the 1967 boundary, but the structure will still jut deep into the occupied territory in some areas, a Defense Ministry official said yesterday. Nezah Mashiah, head of the wall project in the Defense Ministry, told Israel Radio that the new route would put the Jewish settlement bloc of Gush Etzion on the “Israeli side” of the contentious barrier. Gush Etzion — home to 40,000 Israelis — is about 10 kilometers southeast of Jerusalem.
Mashiah said the Defense Ministry’s new map is meant to comply with an Israeli Supreme Court ruling last month, which found that a 30-kilometer section of the wall near Jerusalem violated Palestinian rights and international law. The Supreme Court said its ruling would apply to other sections of the 680-kilometer wall. One-quarter of the structure has been built.
“Within the framework of changes following the Supreme Court decision, there is certainly movement in the direction of the Green Line,” Mashiah said, referring to the Israel-West Bank boundary until the 1967 Mideast war. The fate of two other large West Bank settlements - Maale Adumim and Ariel - has not been determined yet, Mashiah said.
Israel’s Defense Ministry said that the construction of the wall would be completed by the end of next year as planned, despite recent court rulings. “The security fence will be finished by the end of 2005,” Defense Ministry Director General Amos Yaron told military radio.
He also confirmed that parts of the wall would be redirected closer to the Green Line.
Meanwhile, Israel’s high court has given the army 30 days to answer rights groups’ protests that it is preventing 2,500 Palestinians, including pregnant women and children, from returning home to the Gaza Strip from Egypt, judicial sources told AFP yesterday.
Some of the Palestinians have been waiting for more than two weeks because of the almost complete sealing of the Israeli-controlled Rafah border since July 10, their spokesmen said. The crossing has been open for just two days in that period.
The court ruling was released hours after three organizations and a dozen Palestinians filed a petition to seek the lifting of security restrictions so that Palestinians stuck in Rafah, on the Egyptian side of the border with Israel, could get home. “There is a dire situation taking place right now and the high court is not working to reach a solution,” said Shabtai Gold of Physicians for Human Rights-Israel.
He said 30 days was too long a period and that the court hearings would take place at even a later date. Gold said the petitioners’ lawyer Ehab Iraqi had filed an emergency appeal to the court asking it to move up the deadline. “It seems we’re running out of options,” said Gold, adding that the army was preventing his medical organization from entering the Gaza Strip for what it termed the security of its Israeli employees.
Israeli Army bulldozers demolished 14 Palestinian houses in the southern Gaza Strip town of Rafah yesterday near the border with Egypt, Palestinian security sources said. The bulldozers, backed by a column of tanks, left their positions on the borderline and drove into Rafah’s Al-Barahma neighborhood in the early morning.
