Gunmen kill three in Jewish settlement attack

Palestinian gunmen killed three Israelis and wounded two others, one seriously, at an isolated Jewish settlement in the Gaza Strip early today.

Soldiers killed one infiltrator, the Israeli military said.

The attack at the settlement of Netzarim, south west of Gaza City, came as Israeli officials disclosed that a security barrier Israel was building along the West Bank could become a unilaterally-imposed border, annexing the strategic Jordan River Valley, a development that would pre-empt peace negotiations.

The military officials said the gunmen crossed the exterior fence and opened fire. They did not enter the settlement itself, the sources said. Soldiers searching for the Palestinians shot dead one of them and were looking for another. Israel Radio said dense fog hampered the search.

In northern Gaza, soldiers shot dead a Palestinian who was apparently trying to infiltrate another settlement, Israel Radio reported. Last Thursday, three members of an Israeli settler family were slightly wounded in a Palestinian gunfire attack in southern Gaza. Settlers said the gunman was shot dead.

The Gaza Strip is surrounded by a security fence, which has prevented most attempted infiltrations from Gaza into Israel. However, Israel’s plan to build a similar fence around the West Bank has run into stiff criticism, because it would cut deep into the West Bank, territory claimed by the Palestinians.

A senior Israeli official said the Jordan River Valley, at the eastern edge of the West Bank, must remain under Israeli security control, and the plan for a fence that would cut the valley off from the rest of West Bank had been approved. However, no funds had yet been allocated for its construction, the official said.

Up to now, most attention has been focused on the other side of the West Bank, where Israel has completed the first section of the barrier and has approved the route for the rest.

Israel says the barrier is necessary to keep suicide bombers and other Palestinian attackers out of the country, but Palestinians refer to the complex of fences, walls, electronic sensors and barbed wire as an “apartheid wall” designed to confiscate their land.

Hundreds of Israelis have been killed in suicide bombings carried out by Palestinians who easily infiltrated the unmarked and unguarded line between Israel and the West Bank, blowing themselves up in crowded Israeli cities.

While prime minister Ariel Sharon has said that the barrier is meant as a security measure, not a border, finance minister Benjamin Netanyahu – Sharon’s main rival in the ruling Likud Party – went further in an TV interview, implying that the barrier could be a permanent frontier.

“At this moment, because we do not have an arrangement with the other side, we are making a unilateral arrangement,” he said yesterday.

The United States is opposed to unilateral measures by either side that would pre-empt negotiations under the ”road map” peace plan, which calls for an end to three years of violence and leads to a Palestinian state in 2005. Issues like borders and the future of Israeli settlements are to be negotiated in the final stage of the “road map” plan.

The senior official said the route of the fence along the Jordan Valley had been approved by the defence establishment, and it fits Sharon’s concept of permanent Israeli control over the valley.

“Israel must control the Jordan Valley for security purposes, even if it does not have sovereignty,” the official said, a rare government indication that Israel might negotiate over sovereignty there.

Sharon’s long-standing concept of a permanent arrangement with the Palestinians would give the Palestinians authority over populated enclaves around the West Bank, while Israel would maintain control over the entire periphery. Palestinians demand a state in all of the West Bank and Gaza Strip with a capital in the Arab section of Jerusalem.

This week the United Nations General Assembly overwhelmingly passed a resolution demanding that Israel stop construction of the barrier and tear down the sections already completed. Israel flatly rejected the non-binding resolution.