Israel is redrawing the route of a barrier going up in the West Bank to cut out most of its controversial loops around Jewish settlements on occupied land, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz said yesterday.
It 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. Sharon is widely expected to cement the plan in an upcoming trip to Washington.
Haaretz did not specify how the West Bank barrier would be revised, but quoted Sharon's chief of staff Dov Weisglass saying he believed the final route would be 600km long, 100km less than the version proposed in 2002.
That route approximated Israel's 1967 boundary with the West Bank but also cut deep into occupied land to enclose settlement blocs, drawing land-grab charges from the Palestinians. Israel calls the barrier a security precaution against suicide bombers.
Sharon, long the settlers' champion, shocked Israel by proposing last week to dismantle 17 of 21 Gaza settlements and several in the West Bank in a unilateral plan to separate from the Palestinians should a US-backed peace "road map" fail.
Sharon proposed to move some of the 7,500 Gaza settlers to Jewish enclaves remaining in the West Bank. A Sharon adviser said visiting US deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley and National Security Council senior director Elliott Abrams were expected to study the proposal this week.
Sharon's go-it-alone plan would leave Palestinians with less land than they want for a state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, captured in the 1967 Middle East War. Most of the international community sees the settlements as illegal. Israel disputes this.
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