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Israel Authorises 300 West Bank Homes; Releases Senior Hamas MP
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by stevesmys | June 23, 2009 at 10:32 am
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Israel has authorised the construction of 300 new homes at a Jewish settlement on the West Bank, less than a week after the US pressed for halts on settlement expansion.
Israeli Army Radio said on Tuesday that 60 of the 300 homes slated for the Talmon settlement in the West Bank had already been built.
Ehud Barak, the defence minister, who oversees West Bank operations, had approved plans to construct another 240 units there, the radio said.
At a speech in Cairo, US President Barrack Obama urged Israel to halt expansion of Jewish settlements on the West Bank and east Jerusalem, where about 500,000 Jewish settlers live in more than 200 settlements.
Isreal Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has refused to declare a settlement freeze
Meanwhile, the Israeli government has released the Hamas speaker of the Palestinian parliament, Abdul Aziz Dweik.
srael detained Dweik, 60, and nearly 40 other Hamas politicians in the occupied West Bank in 2006 after Hamas fighters captured Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier, on the boundary of the Gaza Strip.
The arrests paralysed the Palestinian Legislative Council, dominated by Hamas since defeating the Western-backed Fatah faction in a parliamentary election earlier in 2006.
Hamas did not reveal whether Dweik would return as parliament speaker. However, the party has suggested that he's a possible candidate for Palestinian presidency.
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at 23:15 on July 13th, 2009
Dore Gold from the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs discusses recent U.S. efforts to constrain natural growth construction in the West Bank, and the contradictions inherent in this policy.
"Given the fact that the amount of territory taken up by the built-up areas of all the settlements in the West Bank is estimated to be 1.7 percent of the territory, the marginal increase in territory that might be affected by natural growth is infinitesimal. Moreover, since Israel unilaterally withdrew 9,000 Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005, the argument that a settler presence will undermine a future territorial compromise has lost much of its previous force"
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