Palestinians Assail Israeli Plan to Expand Settlement

EFRAT, Israeli-Occupied West Bank —  Palestinian leaders on Thursday blasted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s promise to build hundreds of new housing units in this Jewish settlement as “irresponsible, provocative and unnecessary.”

Israeli officials defended the proposed buildup in Efrat as “natural growth,” but Marwan Kanafani, a spokesman for Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, called it “a severe blow” to efforts to restart peace negotiations.

“The guy has a lust for Palestinian land. Every time there is some hope, he throws another obstacle in the path of peace,” Kanafani said of the Israeli prime minister.

Settlement building is at the root of the current crisis in Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, which have been frozen since March, when Netanyahu gave the green light to build a 6,500-unit Jewish housing project in traditionally Arab East Jerusalem.

Meanwhile, Palestinian security forces Thursday night closed 16 Islamic social service organizations in the Gaza Strip and a television station in the West Bank city of Nablus that is identified with the militant Islamic group Hamas.

Israeli radio reported that the Palestinians also arrested dozens of Hamas activists in Nablus and the West Bank cities of Kalqilya and Tulkarm, but this could not be independently verified.

Abdel Aziz Rantissi, a Hamas political leader in Gaza, said that three employees of one of the Islamic organizations had been arrested but that he was unaware of any Hamas political or military leaders having been detained.

The military wing of Hamas claimed responsibility for two suicide bombing attacks in downtown Jerusalem this summer that killed 25 people, including five bombers. Israel recently identified four of the bombers as Hamas militants from a Palestinian village outside of Nablus, embarrassing Arafat, who had insisted they came from abroad.

Hamas leaders said that the Palestinian Authority’s crackdown on Islamic kindergartens, youth clubs and agencies to aid the poor was a response to U.S. and Israeli pressure on Arafat.

“Negotiations are to begin between the Israelis and Palestinians in Washington, and they [the Palestinians] are paving the way in front of these negotiations,” Rantissi said. “Netanyahu is paving the way by promising settlers to widen the settlements. Different ways of paving.”

On Wednesday, Netanyahu told high school students at a 30th anniversary celebration of the so-called Gush Etzion settlements that he would build 300 homes in Efrat and expand other communities in the Israeli-occupied area on the southern outskirts of Jerusalem.

The speech drew immediate fire from Secretary of State Madeleine Albright at the United Nations, prompting Israeli government officials to try to downplay the planned construction as a continuation of existing policy.

“This government is not searching for friction. It is not intending that its actions be construed in a provocative manner,” said government spokesman Moshe Fogel. “What we are saying is pure logic that we believe can be accepted by anyone who looks at the situation from a logical point of view.”

Efrat belongs to the Gush Etzion bloc of settlements between Bethlehem and Hebron, founded on sites of earlier Jewish settlements. Israelis see the enclaves as “suburbs” of Jerusalem, and there is a consensus on both sides of the Israeli political spectrum that the land should remain part of Israel in any final peace settlement with the Palestinians.

Fogel said that the Efrat development was approved by the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and does not represent a more rapid settlement growth rate than that which took place under the previous, Labor governments.

Netanyahu “took an approval in principle [from Rabin] and turned it into a practical approval for 300 new units,” said Efrat Mayor Yinon Ahiman. “They are selling us the same car for the second time.”

Ahiman said that Rabin had prohibited Efrat from building on an even more remote hilltop in 1995 and, instead, approved a plan to build 700 units on a hill called Givat Hazait that abuts the existing development. He said Rabin gave the go-ahead to begin construction on the first 400 of those units.

Local bureaucracy and “incompetence” have delayed construction on all but about 13 of those units that are to be privately built, according to Efrat residents who are awaiting the new housing on the wind-swept hilltop.

Now, according to Ahiman, Netanyahu told the community that it may go forward with the other 300 units of the 700 that Rabin signed off on and that the Housing Ministry will pay for infrastructure and put the project out to bid.