Israel Plans to Extend Security Barrier

Israel’s Defense Ministry has formulated a plan to extend its security barrier into a new area of the West Bank, despite international pressure to stop construction, a senior Israeli official said Friday. Meanwhile, Palestinian gunmen killed three Israeli soldiers in a Gaza settlement.

The new segment would cut off the Jordan Valley – a region on the eastern side of the West Bank where Israel has a number of settlement – and connect it to Israel.

Earlier this month, the Israeli government approved a series of security barriers that would run through the West Bank, in most areas relatively close to Israel. The Jordan Valley segment, which would be much further to the east, has not yet been presented to the government for approval, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

His comments provided the most detailed confirmation yet that a Jordan Valley segment is being considered by Israel. The official said that this segment would be the last to be built, if it all, depending on the security situation.

Israel says it is building the fences, razor wires and trenches to keep out Palestinian suicide bombers and gunmen. The Palestinians say Israel is grabbing land, unilaterally drawing a border and making it impossible to establish a viable Palestinian state.

“This wall will create a new fact on the ground, which will make it impossible to reach any political solution,” said Hassan Abu Libdeh, a spokesman for Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia.

In the Gaza Strip, Islamic militants broke into an army base at the isolated Jewish settlement of Netzarim in the Gaza Strip under heavy early morning fog Friday and killed three Israeli soldiers – two women and a man – and wounded two in their sleeping quarters.

A settlement security guard, Eliyahu Zan, said that a call came over his walkie-talkie warning that an attacker was in the settlement. “We heard the sound of the shooting very loudly. It pounded in our ears,” he told Israel Radio.

Troops shot and killed one of the Palestinians, who was armed with an assault rifle, the army said. Troops failed to find a second attacker.

In a phone call to The Associated Press, the militant Islamic Jihad said one of its members carried out the shooting together with a gunman from Hamas. The caller identified the dead attacker as Samir Fouda, 21, a Hamas militant from Gaza’s Jebaliya refugee camp, and said the other assailant escaped.

Also Friday, Palestinian doctors said an 11-year-old Palestinian died during surgery after he was injured by gunshots in Gaza. Troops fired machine guns in the area of the boy’s home, Palestinians said. The army said it did not know of any shooting in the area. Elsewhere in Gaza, a 10-year-old boy was shot in the stomach and was taken to a hospital in critical condition.

Also, in northern Gaza, soldiers shot and killed a Palestinian who approached the fence of another settlement, the military said.

Meanwhile, two Palestinian men died of wounds from an Israeli helicopter missile strike Monday in a Gaza refugee camp, bringing the death toll in that airstrike to 10. Also, a 15-year-old Palestinian died of wounds from a battle last week between Israeli troops and gunmen in the southern Gaza town of Rafah.

Separately, in the West Bank, Israeli undercover troops arrested one of the Islamic Jihad’s top leaders as he sat in a sweets shop in the town of Ramallah Thursday evening. The fugitive, Osama Barham, 40, a top leader of the group’s military wing, had been hiding out for three years and is blamed by Israel for numerous terror attacks.

As violence continued, an Israeli official talked of plans to hang on to the strategic Jordan Valley in the framework of a security barrier being built through the West Bank.

The Gaza Strip is surrounded by a security fence, which has prevented most attempted infiltrations from Gaza into Israel.

Over the last three years of fighting, more than 400 Israelis have been killed in suicide bombings carried out by Palestinians who easily infiltrated the unmarked and unguarded line between Israel and the West Bank, blowing themselves up in crowded Israeli cities.

While Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has said that the barrier is meant as a security measure, not a border, Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – Sharon’s main rival in the ruling Likud Party – suggested that the barrier could become a permanent frontier in the absence of a peace plan.

“At this moment, because we do not have an arrangement with the other side, we are making a unilateral arrangement,” he told Israel TV’s Channel 2 in an interview broadcast Thursday.

The United States is opposed to unilateral measures by either side that would pre-empt negotiations under the “road map” peace plan, which calls for an end to three years of violence and leads to a Palestinian state in 2005. Issues like borders and the future of Israeli settlements are to be negotiated in the final stage of the “road map” plan.

The senior official said the route of the fence along the Jordan Valley has been approved by the defense establishment, and it fits Sharon’s concept of permanent Israeli control over the valley.

“Israel must control the Jordan Valley for security purposes, even if it does not have sovereignty,” the official said, a rare government indication that Israel might negotiate over sovereignty there.

Sharon’s long-standing concept of a permanent arrangement with the Palestinians would give the Palestinians authority over populated enclaves around the West Bank, while Israel would maintain control over the entire periphery. Palestinians demand a state in all of the West Bank and Gaza Strip with a capital in the Arab section of Jerusalem.

Nineteen small Jewish settlements dot the Jordan River Valley, a parched, hot strip of barren land punctuated by two main oases – the Palestinian towns of Jericho and Jiftliq. The kingdom of Jordan is clearly visible across the narrow river.

This week the U.N. General Assembly overwhelmingly passed a resolution demanding that Israel stop construction of the barrier and tear down the sections already completed, but Israel rejected the nonbinding resolution.

Also Thursday, Palestinians and the United States criticized the latest Israeli tender for building new housing in West Bank settlements.