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========================== F  r  e  e  d  o  m ==========================
  auto-info: help@alquds.net  >>>> Linking Palestinians & Their Friends
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Subject: A tour of the West Bank: from settlement to settlement
From: AFP / Hisham Abdallah <C-afp@clari.net>
Date: Fri, 17 Oct 1997 7:21:10 PDT
Organization: Copyright 1997 by Agence France-Presse

   WADI QANA, West Bank, Oct 17 (AFP) - "This will soon be a new
Jewish settlement," said Khalil Tufakji, a Palestinian settlement
expert, pointing to bulldozers flattening parts of a thick grove of
olive trees in the West Bank valley.
   The bulldozers were working outside the Jewish settlement of
Yaqqir, a clump of homes on top of a hill overlooking Wadi Qana, a
dramatic valley lined with Palestinian olive trees in the northern
West Bank.
   Tufakji was speaking to dozens of foreign diplomats and
journalists on a tour of the northern West Bank organized by the
Palestinian information ministry to show the damage caused by
Israel's plans for aggressive settlement expansion.
   The Israeli settlement drive is part of a "planned policy to
empty these lands of their Palestinian inhabitants," said
Palestinain officials on the tour, held on Wednesday.
   On the main road between Nablus and Ramallah, Tufakji pointed
out the settlement of Elie, perched on its hilltop. Then on the
other side of the hill, there was continuing building running down
the slope.
   "That's the extension of Elie," he said.
   Then from the next hilltop, Tufakji pointed to the wide view of
the hilly West Bank landscape extending southward. On each hilltop:
a settlement, with its concentration of modern red-roofed houses.
"So you can see how the whole area has come under Israeli control,"
he said.
   "What is the extent of a settlement? No one knows. Is it the
area of the existing buildings, or the ultimate plans drawn up by
the occupation authorities, or is the extent of the roads leading to
the settlements?" Tufakji said.
   Over a third of the 140-odd settlements built by Israel since it
occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967 were built in the
northern West Bank.
   Most were built in the 1970s and 1980s, when Israeli officials
followed Likud hawk Ariel Sharon's "hilltop strategy", building
settlements on hills between Palestinian communities in order to
divide them.
   Now, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to go
on with expansion of settlements, shrugging off American and
Palestinian protests.
   "You can see how this settlement has extended over lands
confiscated from Palestinian farmers," said Mahmud Allul, the
governor of Nablus, during a stop at Ariel, the second largest
settlement in the West Bank.
   "The Palestinian villages meanwhile have stayed as they are, no
development or increase over 30 years," he said.
   According to Palestinian statistics, Israel has confiscated some
12,500  acres (5,000 hectares) of Palestinian land in the northern
West Bank alone since the start of the peace process in 1993, for
settlement purposes.
   The figure does not include hundreds of acres confiscated to
build new roads to service the settlements. Palestinians are banned
from building homes near both settlements and the "bypass roads".
   Palestinians on the tour also pointed out the large industrial
area of 45 factories built next to Ariel, which produces mainly
fabrics and plastics for export abroad -- but also, they said, dumps
its waste on Palestinian lands.
   "The owners of these factories escape the tighter rules on
health and the environment inside Israel itself, to work in the West
Bank, where they get tax breaks. But they are poisoning the
Palestinians," said Khalil Suleiman, an  environmental expert from
Nablus' Najah university.
   "They produce chemical waste which they dump on Palestinian land
and gases which threaten people's health and damage the ozone
layer," he said.
   Moreover, Israeli building projects have swallowed up hundreds
of Palestinian olive groves and other agricultural products which
form a large part of the economy, he said.
   One of the foreign diplomats on the tour, the British deputy
consul in Jerusalem, Mary Pring, said the effects of the settlements
was "no surprise to us".
   "But it confirms what we have heard about settlements. We will
be reporting on this to our governments," she told journalists.