20 Settlements Will Be Razed

JERUSALEM —  The Israeli government will start dismantling illegally built Jewish settlements in the West Bank today because of the difficulty of protecting them, Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said Saturday.

The defense minister promised that 10 settlements will be removed by the end of the day and that another 10 will disappear in coming days. Negotiations with settlement leaders were reportedly underway Saturday in an effort to avoid the kind of ugly confrontation between settlers and the Israeli army that has occurred in the past.

The sites in question are remote outposts of established settlements, often no more than clusters of mobile homes flying Israeli flags on scrubby West Bank hills. Even though they are small and relatively easy to move, the outposts constitute an emotionally charged issue for both Palestinians and Israelis. While Palestinians consider them an affront to their sovereignty, many Israelis resent the burden they pose on the army, which has the responsibility of protecting them.

“These outposts are very isolated and have very few people in them, which is a security threat of the first degree,” Ben-Eliezer said Saturday night on Israeli television. He did not identify the specific settlements to be dismantled.

The Defense Ministry must approve any new settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The outposts to be dismantled have never received government approval.

Ben-Eliezer made the promise to start the demolitions immediately at a meeting earlier Saturday of the Labor Party, which he heads. He is facing criticism from some party members who believe that Labor has lost credibility because of its coalition with hard-line Likud Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, particularly in the midst of Israel’s harsh crackdown on the Palestinians as part of a campaign to root out terrorists.

Saturday night, a settler leader, Hasdai Eliezer, chastised Ben-Eliezer for a purely “political act” designed to appease critics within his party. He complained that the decision to dismantle settlements would “reward terrorism.”

Defense Ministry officials said Ben-Eliezer hoped to reach an agreement with the settlers before the army moved in with bulldozers.

“The minister does not want a forceful evacuation. He wants it to be done voluntarily,” said Yarden Vatikai, a Defense Ministry spokesman.

Peace Now, an Israeli group that opposes settlements, released a report Saturday saying that at least 44 settlement sites have been established in the West Bank since Sharon was elected in February 2001. Sharon is credited with having directed the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip after the territories were captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East War and is widely considered the patron saint of the settler movement.

The outpost settlements are most vulnerable to attack by Palestinian militants because they are often outside perimeter fences. Three particularly brutal slayings occurred this month at one such settlement, Karmei Tzur, near Hebron, where a woman who was nine months pregnant, her husband and an Israeli reserve soldier were gunned down by Palestinian militants.

Residents of the outpost communities are considered the most radical of the settlers.

“They imitate the Wild West. They have horses. They have cattle. They have guns. They are playing cowboy and treating others, in this case the Palestinians, as though they are the Indians,” said Amiram Goldblum, a settlement expert with Peace Now.

Goldblum said that although removing the thinly populated outposts might address some Labor Party complaints about Ben-Eliezer, it would do little to address the larger problem of the settlements.

“It is not even a drop in the bucket. More like a drop in the well,” he said.

Roughly 200,000 people live in 145 settlements in the West Bank and Gaza.

In other developments Saturday, the Israeli army sifted through the wreckage of the former Palestinian security headquarters in Hebron looking for the bodies of 15 Palestinian militants who it says were holed up inside. The four-story building, which had dominated the Hebron skyline, was blown up by the army Friday night in a tremendous explosion that broke windows more than 200 yards away.

When no bodies were found over the course of the day, Palestinians charged that Israel had destroyed the building out of spite, not to root out militants.

Israel, charged Palestinian Information Minister Yasser Abed-Rabbo, wants to impose “its rule upon the Palestinian people and to destroy all symbols of the Palestinian Authority.”