Outposts built despite Israeli vow, report says

TEKOA D OUTPOST, West Bank -- Israelis built four new settlement outposts in the West Bank last year and significantly expanded 12 others, according to an Israeli watchdog group, despite the government's pledge nearly two years ago to dismantle such unauthorized communities and freeze settlement expansion.

The Israeli group Peace Now, which monitors construction in nearly 250 settlements and outposts in the West Bank and Gaza Strip through visits and flyovers, presented its findings for 2004 on the same day that Israeli and Palestinian leaders said they would meet at a summit next week at the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh with President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and King Abdullah of Jordan, in the most tangible sign yet that 4½ years of fighting could be drawing to an end.

But the annual report on settlements underscored what has been a fixture of the conflict for decades and a sore spot for Palestinians: that Israel, in times of both conciliation and confrontation, and in defiance of international pressure as well as its commitments as part of the US-backed ''road map" to peace, has persistently expanded its presence on land Palestinians claim as part of their future state.

At an outpost yesterday south of Jerusalem, where 10 families live in trailer homes amid a breathtaking landscape of desert mountains and olive groves, residents of the three-year-old community showed little interest in either settlement monitors or the recent stirrings in the peace process.

''These kinds of things don't make a difference to me," said Yair Lev-Ari, 25, a settler with a shaggy beard and blue wool cap. ''I'm here because of my faith that the land of Israel belongs to the people of Israel."

Tekoa D, one of three satellite extensions of the original Tekoa community, is among about 100 outposts scattered mostly on hilltops across the West Bank. The outposts are wildcat settlements, usually set up without government authorization by young Israelis bent on tightening Israel's grip on the land. About 150 government-sanctioned settlements were built over the past 35 years.

Although Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel has conceded that many of the outposts are illegal, Peace Now said government institutions quietly shore them up by connecting power and water lines, paving roads around them, even helping residents construct houses.

''It's all with Israeli tax money," Dror Etkes, head of Peace Now's Settlement Watch Team, told reporters.

Showing photographs taken from planes flying over the West Bank, Etkes said that at 15 other outposts, settlers were building permanent houses to replace trailer homes -- a sign, the group said, that the outposts were burgeoning into full-fledged settlements.

He said about 2,000 Israelis live in the outposts. He added that in established West Bank settlements, where about 220,000 people live, Israeli authorities issued tenders last year for construction of 962 new housing units, a further violation of the road map.

An official in Sharon's office declined to comment on the Peace Now report.

The Israeli army, which runs much of the West Bank, acknowledged yesterday that settlers had erected several illegal outposts in the past year. Officers quoted in the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz said Sharon had frozen the dismantling of West Bank settlements for now, probably to avoid further antagonizing settlers amid Israel's plan to withdraw troops and Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip this year.

Israel agreed to freeze ''all settlement activity" when it accepted the road map for peace in May 2003. That plan also says Israel must dismantle unauthorized outposts established after March 2001, which Etkes said numbered about 50.

The plan calls on Palestinians to halt all attacks on Israel and dismantle armed groups -- the latter a demand the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, says he will not meet because he wants to avoid clashes between Palestinian police and armed factions.

Two outposts were dismantled last year, according to Peace Now, one by Israeli authorities and the other by settlers under pressure from the Defense Ministry. But one of the outposts was later reestablished.

''Very, very little is being dismantled," Etkes said. ''And when something is being dismantled, there is compensation elsewhere" in the West Bank. He added that the location of the outposts was designed to prevent Palestinians from ever having a contiguous state in the West Bank, which President Bush repeatedly has said must be part of any resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Aaron Rehberg, another resident of Tekoa D, said Palestinians had no right to the land because it was God's gift to the Jews.

''Everything we do is legal," he said as he and his wife tended to a vegetable garden of shallots, potatoes, red leaf lettuce, and radishes. ''We're not looking for trouble."

Rehberg, 24, grew up in Albuquerque and moved two years ago to the Tekoa settlement, about a half mile from his current home. But the settlement became too big, Rehberg says, and he wanted to live where ''we could be more like pioneers."

For decades, Sharon was the main architect of Israel's policy to expand settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, which Israel captured in the 1967 war. His government now plans to dismantle 21 settlements in Gaza and four in the West Bank this summer.

The Gaza withdrawal is expected to be discussed at the summit next week attended by Sharon, Abbas, Mubarak, and King Abdullah. But many Palestinians and some Israelis say they think Sharon is pulling out of Gaza to deflect attention from his drive to appropriate much of the West Bank for Israel.

''I think the very obvious conclusion is that Sharon's disengagement from Gaza is in order to fortify settlements in the West Bank," Etkes said.