Israel starts work on new settlements
Olmert unwell, taken from jail to hospital
JERUSALEM, June 20, (Agencies): Israel broke ground on Tuesday on its first new settlement in the occupied West Bank for two decades, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, announcing the symbolic move on the eve of a peace mission by White House senior adviser Jared Kushner.
Since April 2016, work began on 2,758 dwellings, compared to 1,619 during the previous 12 months.
The figures do not include Israeliannexed east Jerusalem which the Jewish state considers an integral part of its “indivisible capital”.
Settlement watchdog Peace Now said the settlement boom coincided with a 2.5-percent drop in construction starts inside Israel.
“Instead of working to solve the Israeli housing crisis, the government prioritises a radical minority living beyond the boundaries of the state,” it said.
Conflict
“Such construction continues to distance us from the only way to end the Israeli Palestinian conflict — a twostate solution.”
More than 600,000 Israelis live in settlements in the West Bank, including east Jerusalem, that are seen as a major obstacle to peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
They live alongside some three million Palestinians.
“Work began today on-site, as I promised, to establish the new settlement,” Netanyahu wrote on his Twitter feed, which included a photograph of mechanical equipment digging into a rocky field.
He was referring to the construction of Amichai, which will house some 300 settlers evicted in February from the Amona outpost after Israel’s Supreme Court ruled their homes had been built illegally on privately-owned Palestinian land.
By highlighting the earth-moving work — no date has been announced for actual housing construction — Netanyahu appeared to suggest he believed he had little to fear from US President Donald Trump’s administration over settlement building that has drawn Palestinian and international condemnation.
Trust
During a meeting at the White House in February, Trump asked Netanyahu to “hold back on settlements for a little bit”, a request seen as part of an effort to build trust with the Palestinians ahead of a renewed push for peace.
The White House said on Sunday that Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, would arrive in Israel on Wednesday and that he and Jason Greenblatt, a top US national security aide who preceded him on Monday, would meet Israeli and Palestinian leaders.
Nabil Abu Rdainah, a spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, called the ground-breaking “a grave escalation and an attempt to foil efforts by the American administration to revive negotiations”, especially (before) the arrival of the US envoys”.
Kushner and Greenblatt will sound out both sides “about their priorities and potential next steps” as part of Trump’s attempt to revive peace talks that collapsed in 2014, a White House official said.
But the official said any peace deal “will take time” and likely require “many visits by both Mr Kushner and Mr Greenblatt” to the region.
Palestinians regard settlements, around 200 of which have been built over the past 50 years on occupied land that they seek for a state, as obstacles to a viable and contiguous country. Around 400,000 Israelis now live in West Bank settlements, among around 2.8 million Palestinians.
When Trump visited Jerusalem on May 22-23, he studiously avoided any mention of settlements, at least in public.
Israel decided in March to build Amichai, which means “My People Live”, and in recent weeks it has approved plans for more than 3,000 settler homes elsewhere in the West Bank.
Most countries view settlements that Israel has built on land captured in the June 1967 Middle East war as illegal. Israel disputes that, citing biblical, historical and political links to the West Bank, as well as security interests.
The Palestinians want an independent state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with its capital in East Jerusalem, and also claim historical and political links to the land.
Ruled
Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 and the territory is now ruled by the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas.
Meanwhile, a spokesman for Israel’s Prison Service says imprisoned former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was taken to hospital after feeling unwell.
Assaf Librati says a doctor examined Olmert after he “didn’t feel well” and instructed that he be taken to hospital on Tuesday.
Librati declined to comment on local media reports that Olmert had suffered a heart attack.
The 71-year-old Olmert, who is appealing for early release, was a longtime fixture in Israel’s hawkish right wing when he dramatically took a more conciliatory line toward the Palestinians a decade ago.
He was convicted in 2014 in a wideranging case that accused him of accepting bribes to promote a realestate project years before he became premier in 2006.