Bush to pressure Israel over settlement plan
(Agencies)
Updated: 2005-04-06 09:48

US President Bush on Tuesday demanded Israel stop expanding Jewish settlements, as a plan to extend the largest West Bank settlement threatened to cloud his upcoming meeting with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

"Our position is very clear, that the road map is important. And the road map calls for no expansion of the settlements," Bush told reporters in Washington ahead of a meeting next Monday with Sharon at his ranch in Crawford, Texas.

He said he would press Sharon to abide by a U.S.-backed peace plan which calls for "no expansion" of Jewish settlements.

A Palestinian boy looks at a house destroyed by Israeli troops, because it was built without permission, in east Jerusalem April 4, 2005. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon pledged on Monday to push ahead with expansion of a large Jewish settlement near Jerusalem, despite U.S. concerns and Palestinian protests that it would cut them off from the city. [Reuters]

But Bush, who has backed Sharon's intention to retain large West Bank settlement blocs in a future peace deal with the Palestinians, stopped short of criticizing the Israeli leader.

Sharon heightened White House concern over the plan to build 3,500 homes between the West Bank settlement of Maale Adumim and Jerusalem by telling a parliamentary committee on Monday that Maale Adumim should be linked to the holy city.

Israeli officials quickly tried to ease U.S. concerns by assuring them no building was planned for the near future.

"There are no plans to invite construction bids in 2005. It is not at an operative stage," one of the sources quoted Housing Minister Issac Herzog as telling U.S. National Security Council official Elliot Abrams at a meeting in Washington on Monday.

US President George W. Bush (C) speaks to reporters beside US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (L) and US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (R) following a Cabinet meeting at the White House 05 April 2005 in Washington, DC. Six days before his scheduled meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Bush said there should be 'no expansion' of Israeli settlements in Palestinian territories under the US-backed 'road-map' to Middle East peace.[AFP]

Palestinians fear the project would cut them off from the eastern part of the holy city which they want as the capital of their future state.

Sharon's comment to a parliamentary panel that the plan was not "a serious problem" was widely seen in Israel as an attempt to mollify Jewish settlers and their supporters in his right-wing Likud party in the run-up to a planned pullout from the Gaza Strip this summer.

Israel regards all of Jerusalem, including the eastern part of the city it captured in the 1967 Middle East war, as its capital, a claim that is not accepted internationally.

SHARON MEETS GAZA SETTLERS

Trying to mend fences, Sharon met about a dozen rank-and-file Gaza settlers in his Jerusalem office to discuss their proposal to move the entire Gush Katif settlement bloc in Gaza to a site just up the coast in southern Israel.

The participants said they would meet again with Sharon on the proposal, which they said would encourage most settlers to leave Gaza before the withdrawal, scheduled to begin on July 20.

One participant, Yoav Alul, said if Sharon accepted the proposal, he believed the settlers would leave voluntarily.

"(But) we hope it (the disengagement) won't happen," he told Channel Two television. "We will take all steps to prevent it, but democratically and without force or violence."

The Gaza settlers' council, which has vowed to flood the occupied territory with protesters ahead of a pullout it said could stoke civil strife, condemned the dialogue as a "divide and rule" tactic by Sharon, the settlers' former champion.

But another participant, Aharon Hazut, said it made sense to talk to Sharon, whose government is offering compensation to settlers to enable them to buy new homes in Israel.

"(The battle) is not lost, but we want to make certain that we have insurance, because we know there's a chance we'll lose this struggle," Hazut told Channel One television.

For their part, Palestinians fear the Gaza evacuation is a ploy to trade the impoverished coastal strip where 8,500 settlers live for large swathes of the West Bank, where most of Israel's 240,000 settlers reside.

In Gaza, a Palestinian gunman shot and wounded an Israeli at a Jewish settlement despite a truce Israel and the Palestinian Authority declared in February, military sources said.

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