Secret West Bank Road Plan Stirs Worry

The Israeli army has drawn up a secret multimillion-dollar plan to build more than 300 miles of roads throughout the occupied West Bank, Israel Radio reported Thursday.

Coming on the heels of a decision this week to let West Bank settlers acquire 300 mobile homes as temporary shelters for schools, and news that thousands of Israelis have illegally occupied vacant homes in the territories in spite of an official freeze, the plan alarmed Israelis opposed to expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

“If the government builds these roads, this is going to be the end of the Oslo agreement,” warned Mossi Raz, secretary-general of the group Peace Now, referring to the peace framework agreed to by Israel and Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization.

The 51-page road plan, reportedly drafted by Maj. Gen. Uzi Dayan, West Bank commander of the Israeli army, and given to senior government officials, has not been endorsed by the Israeli government. The Defense Ministry on Thursday acknowledged the existence of the classified report but refused any further comment.

Meanwhile, Palestinian media reported that nine Palestinian houses have been destroyed in the last week in Jerusalem and the West Bank, in part to make way for roads already approved to serve Israeli settlements.

Aharon Domb, spokesman for the Council of Jewish Communities of Judea, Samaria and Gaza, said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Cabinet must be even more forthright in supporting the 144 Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, where an estimated 140,000 Israelis now live.

“This government was elected, among other things, based on its promise to expand the Jewish settlements,” he told Israel Radio. “This is not the previous government, and there seem to be those who forget this fact, even among government officials.”

Palestinians have expressed outrage over a decision made public Tuesday by Defense Minister Yitzhak Mordecai to approve transferring 300 mobile homes to the territories, mainly to settlements that said they needed them as classrooms or to shelter students.

The decision was symbolic, in that the previous two Labor governments had banned the introduction of even a single mobile home into the territories. Traditionally, such trailers were the means for staking out new land for settlement, followed in time by permanent structures.

In a related development, Deputy Housing Minister Meir Porush on Wednesday urged the government to sell nearly 2,400 vacant apartments to would-be settlers. His comments came after a survey, conducted by settlers, showed that 1,156 apartments--ordered to be kept empty by the previous government--had already been taken over by Jewish families.

Porush said the sale of the remaining empty apartments should go ahead to prevent further squatting. He said the sales already have been authorized, in principle, with the government’s decision two weeks ago to relax restrictions on the “natural growth” of settlements.

Alarmed by the recent Israeli moves in the West Bank, Arafat wrote to President Clinton on Wednesday, asking him to use U.S. influence to get Israel to slow both settlement expansion and land confiscation, which he said endanger the Middle East peace process.