Israel is weighing a plan to bar Palestinians from the main roads in the West Bank to protect Israeli motorists from roadside shootings, Israeli officials said on Wednesday.
Palestinians denounced the proposal as segregation in the West Bank, the territory the Palestinians are seeking as part of a future state. Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, said it would be "the official introduction of an apartheid system."
A senior Israeli official, who asked not to be named because a number of options are still under consideration, said:
"We think it is necessary to separate traffic on the roads, not all the roads, but the main roads, where Israelis are most vulnerable. It doesn't call for complete separation everywhere, and we see this as sort of a stopgap measure."
The developments came as the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, prepared to meet President George W. Bush in Washington yesterday. Abbas is pushing for a resumption of full-scale peace negotiations, while Israel is demanding that Abbas first crack down on armed Palestinian groups.
The Bush administration says Israel has a right to defend its citizens, but is also urging Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's government to ease the restrictions placed on Palestinians.
In response to a Palestinian shooting on Sunday that killed three young Israelis, the Israeli military currently bars private Palestinian vehicles from traveling on two large stretches of Route 60, the main north-south road in the West Bank. The road links the largest Palestinian cities and is also heavily used by Jewish settlers.
Throughout the past five years of fighting, Israel's security forces have set up scores of checkpoints and roadblocks that have limited or prohibited Palestinian movement on the West Bank road network.
In many places, the military has placed concrete blocks, built earthen mounds and dug trenches to prevent Palestinian village roads from connecting to the main roads.
"Most of the traffic is already separated," said Dror Etkes, an official with Peace Now, an Israeli group that monitors settlements. "There aren't a lot of places left where Israelis and Palestinians are driving on the same roads."
Israel eased some travel restrictions after a February truce that has reduced but not halted the violence.
The Israeli plan now under consideration was first reported on Wednesday in the Israeli newspaper Maariv, which described it as a more formal -- and perhaps permanent -- separation of Israeli and Palestinian traffic in the West Bank.
The newspaper said it could involve building new roads that would be used only by one side or the other, and was part of a larger proposal to completely separate the two sides.
In recent years, Israel has built numerous bypass roads specifically designed to connect large West Bank settlements to Israel.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
RSS