Sharon says Israel cannot hold all settlements

3.00pm

JERUSALEM - Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has told his right-wing Likud party that Israel will have to give up some settlements on occupied land to attain peace with Palestinians, senior political sources said on Tuesday.

The settler movement, banking on stout support within Likud and allied nationalist parties in Sharon's coalition, vowed to campaign against any evacuation of their communities which have been frequent targets of a Palestinian uprising.

Sharon has raised hackles on both sides by hinting he could uproot some isolated Jewish settlements and summarily draw the borders of a Palestinian state should a United States-backed peace plan, now stymied by mutual non-compliance, ultimately collapse.

The boundaries would roughly parallel the path of a controversial barrier Israeli is building through the West Bank.

Israel says the swathe of electronic fencing, trenches and walls is to keep suicide bombers out of the Jewish state. But its projected course would incorporate major settlement blocs and truncate territory where Palestinians seek statehood.

Commenting on Sharon's hints of unilateral steps, veteran Israeli peacemaker Shimon Peres urged the prime minister to pull troops and settlers out of the Gaza Strip immediately.

"I do not see any reason for us staying in Gaza," Peres, leader of the main opposition Labour Party, told Reuters. "Gaza is a burden on our shoulders."

Political sources said Sharon, a longtime patron of settlement on land Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war, reiterated at a stormy meeting of Likud legislators on Monday that "painful concessions" were necessary for peace.

"Ultimately we will not be in all the places we are now," he told the meeting. "I do not rule out unilateral steps... for our own interests, in our favour."

He declined to elaborate. "Sharon has nothing concrete in mind yet," said a senior source close to the prime minister.

Palestinian President Yasser Arafat dismissed Sharon's remarks as a sign that Israel was not committed to the US-engineered "road map" peace plan in the first place.

"This means they don't want to make peace. It is against the road map," Arafat told Reuters on Monday. The United States and Israel refuse any contact with Arafat, accusing him of inciting violence, a charge he denies.

The road map charts reciprocal steps including an end to Palestinian militant attacks and Israeli pullbacks from occupied land en route to a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.

Sharon's coalition accepted the plan last summer only under US pressure and attached a slew of reservations, prompting Palestinian accusations that Israel aimed to scuttle it.

Hard-line Likud deputies blasted Sharon for suggesting evacuations of settlements, the sources said. A cabinet minister advised Sharon to topple Arafat's Palestinian Authority instead.

The YESHA Council representing the 220,000 settlers vowed to block any removal of settlements. It promised to issue its own plan which would dissolve the Palestinian Authority and set up "Arab self-administrations" under over-arching Israeli rule.

Sharon sought to mollify critics in his camp by saying that unless the Palestinian Authority reined in militants waging a three-year-old revolt, as required by the road map, no talks on ushering them toward statehood would transpire.

But he faces rising US pressure to do more to unblock peacemaking and bolster the position of new moderate Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qurie against popular street militants.

- REUTERS