Israel's ruling Kadima party will start working towards a new round of pullouts of Jewish settlers from the occupied West Bank if it wins this month's general election, a senior party figure said.
Avi Dichter, a former head of the Shin Beth internal security service who is one of Kadima's top candidates in the March 28 election, said that although the next government would uproot settlers from parts of the territory, it would not hand over control of the evacuated areas to the Palestinian Authority.
Polls have predicted that Kadima should comfortably win the election despite the absence of coma-stricken Prime Minister Ariel Sharon who steered through last year's massively controversial pullout from the Gaza Strip, known as the disengagement plan.
"The [new] disengagement will be from the settlements, not the land," Dichter said in a conference on Saturday hosted by the Yediot Aharonot daily. "Security control will still be in Israel's hands."
Dichter, who is expected to be given a security portfolio in the next Cabinet, indicated that some settlements would be swallowed up by larger blocs while others would be evacuated in order to ensure settlers' security.
"We are talking about security lines that we will start planning after the government is formed, together with the parties that will make up the government and in cooperation with the settler leaders," he added.
"This means that settlements will converge into settlement blocs," he said.
The Palestinian Authority took control of the whole of the Gaza Strip after both settlers and troops left the territory last year but Dichter said the next round would be what he called only a "civilian disengagement."
Israel refuses to have any dealings with the radical Islamist movement Hamas, which is poised to form the next Palestinian Authority government after its recent landslide general election victory.
"We have no intention of carrying out a military disengagement because we have no partner who will fight terror," Dichter said. "The stage of a full handover of the area will only take after place after a Palestinian Authority arises that proves that it is able to and will fight terror."
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