Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qurie warned Israel yesterday that a barrier it is building inside the West Bank would kill off a US-backed "road map" peace plan.
With peacemaking stymied by persistent bloodshed, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has hinted he will evacuate some settlements and set borders along the barrier, in effect annexing occupied land Palestinians seek for a state.
Sharon says a Palestinian failure to disarm militants behind suicide attacks on Israelis is pushing him towards unilateral security steps. Palestinians say Israel cannot achieve peace by sealing them off with what they call a new "Berlin Wall."
"[The barrier] will kill the [peace] process. It will kill anyone who speaks of peace.Now there is relative quiet. But the terror will start anew. The barrier can't prevent it," Qurie told Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel's largest daily, in an interview.
Relative quiet has prevailed for weeks. But in a flareup before dawn yesterday, Palestinian gunmen wounded seven ultra-Orthodox Jews who defied Israeli military orders by praying at a shrine in the West Bank city of Nablus.
Israeli security sources said one of the Jews was critically injured when gunmen fired at their vehicle near Joseph's Tomb, revered by some as the burial site of the biblical patriarch.
Israel says the swathe of razor-wire fencing, concrete walls and trenches is meant to keep suicide bombers out of its cities and has already thwarted 20 such attacks in two months.
But the barrier frequently deviates from the border well into the West Bank to incorporate settlement blocs. Palestinians have denounced the barrier as a land grab and it has drawn US criticism as prejudicial to any final peace negotiations.
"This is not how you achieve security. This is just a way to preserve the conflict. No one in the world will accept it," Qurie said of the internationally condemned barrier.
"I think the barrier is the line Sharon is basing his unilateral move on. If that's what he intends, it won't help, it won't promote peace. No Palestinian would agree to a state that is trapped inside a wall. It would close any thought of peace."
Qurie told another Israeli daily, Maariv, on Thursday that Sharon's reported go-it-alone plan was a recipe for disaster, saying: "Terror would increase and no one would gain."
Leaders of Sharon's right-wing Likud party said on Wednesday Sharon had outlined a "long-term redeployment" as an alternative to a peace deal and it was accepted by most of its legislators.
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