Some 200 Jewish settlers refused on Monday morning to abandon a wildcat settlement ordered dismantled by Defence Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer six days ago, public radio said.
The young settlers, dubbed ”hilltop youth,” dug in their heels at the Havat Gilad outpost where weekend clashes left more than 50 wounded, the radio said.
The settlers had started to rebuild structures that had been partially destroyed by the army, including one that served as a synagogue, it added.
The army set up checkpoints around the sector, near Nablus in the northern West Bank, to prevent more settlers from coming to resist the soldiers and to try to rebuild the makeshift settlement, the radio said.
Ben Eliezer had first ordered the outpost destroyed last Wednesday, but 1 000 settlers gathered at the site, with some of them attacking journalists and humanitarian workers the same day.
The two sides then agreed to a truce, the settlers claimed, where the army would dismantle the outpost but the settlers could still farm the land.
But Ben Eliezer denied any deal was cut and violence exploded late Saturday when soldiers and more than
1 000 hilltop youth battled over the dismantling of the settlement. Fighting raged until Sunday and left at least 50 wounded, sparking a political row between Ben Eliezer and right-wing ministers in Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s national unity government.
Ben Eliezer threatened on Sunday to pull his left-leaning Labour party from the Sharon government after he was savaged by the settlers’ main political voice, the National Religious Party, public radio reported.
Meanwhile, Tourism Minister Yitzhak Levy from the NRP, which had threatened to bolt the government in anger over Ben Eliezer’s push to rid the West Bank of outpost settlements, said Sunday his party wanted only to be consulted over plans to abandon the outposts in the future, the radio said.
A cabinet meeting on the crisis set for Monday was also delayed another day, the radio said. In a bid to cool down the volatile situation, a representative from the Settlers’ Council, the settlers’ main lobby, urged settlers to ”examine their conscience” and to ”restart dialogue” with the authorities, the radio said.
Havat Gilad, named after a settler slain by Palestinian gunmen in May 2001, has come to symbolise the right-wing constituency’s determination never to surrender to the Palestinians and to stay on in a territory which is home to some of the holiest shrines in Judaism.
The effort to dismantle it pits Ben Eliezer against one of the most influential settlers in the West Bank, Moshe Zar, who established the outpost, and is credited with helping engineer the huge expansion of settlements in the 1980s.
By themselves the outposts, little more than a few caravans and tents on a hilltop, are insignificant. But they are later developed into larger communities which feed the creeping growth of settlements in the West Bank, making it harder and harder to find a political solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, now mired in the two-year-old intifada. – Sapa-AFP