Israel redraws West Bank barrier in quest for US support

JERUSALEM - Israel is redrawing the route of a barrier going up in the West Bank to cut out most of the controversial loops around Jewish settlements to try and secure US support for the project, political sources said on Sunday.

They said the new route would be presented to US officials due in Israel this week to hear a plan by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to separate from the Palestinians.

A Sharon security adviser, Giora Eiland, acknowledged at a security conference in Germany that the barrier's course placed hardships on the Palestinians and should be changed.

Sharon is widely expected to cement the disengagement plan, which he said would leave the Palestinians with less land than they are seeking for a state, in a trip to Washington.

Launched in 2002 after suicide bombings, the barrier approximated the 1967 boundary with the West Bank but was also slated to encircle settlement blocs deep in occupied land.

Palestinians call the project a land grab and the International Court of Justice is to hold hearings on the issue this month at the behest of the United Nations.

"A ruling against Israel in The Hague would likely end up as a vote in the UN Security Council," a source in Sharon's office said. "We need to make sure the Americans back us, hence the effort to agree with them on the route now."

According to the source, the new draft route excludes most West Bank settlement blocs. The Haaretz newspaper quoted Sharon's chief of staff, Dov Weisglass, as saying he believed the final route would be about 600 kilometres long, 100 kilometres shorter than the original approved by the government.

SECURITY OFFICIAL SEES ROUTE CHANGE

Eiland, head of Israel's National Security Council and the official Sharon has asked to draw up plans for a "security line" in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, said the barrier was having repercussions on the lives of Palestinians.

"Israel should now study the full implications of the fence and take effective steps to improve them, including, where necessary, changing the original path of the fence," he said at the Munich Conference on Security Policy.

Palestinian cabinet minister Saeb Erekat said a truncated barrier -- a cement wall in some places and a razor-wire topped electronic fence in others -- was only a half-measure.

"Whether 700 kilometres or 600 kilometres, this wall doesn't separate Palestinians from Israelis but separates Palestinians from Palestinians," Erekat told Reuters. He said the barrier would undermine the US-backed peace "road map."

Sharon, long the settlers' godfather, shocked Israelis by proposing last week to dismantle 17 of 21 Gaza settlements and several in the West Bank as part of a unilateral disengagement.

An official in his office said Sharon was considering moving some of the 7,500 Gaza settlers to Jewish settlements in the West Bank as one of several options under study.

Palestinian Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath urged the United States at the Munich conference not to put the peace road map on hold until after the US presidential election in November.

He said the European Union, Russia and the United Nations should keep the process moving if Washington was preoccupied.

The road map, which envisions Palestinian statehood by 2005, has been battered by bloodshed. On Sunday, Israeli troops killed a Palestinian militant and wounded five others in a Gaza raid.

An Israeli air strike on a car in Gaza on Saturday killed an Islamic Jihad militant leader and a 12-year-old boy.

A Sharon adviser said US deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley and National Security Council senior director Elliot Abrams would visit this week to study the Sharon plan.

Most of the international community sees the 145 settlements Israel has built in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as illegal. Israel disputes this.

- REUTERS