Dozens of Jewish settlers 'want Sharon dead'

Israel’s internal security service chief warned today that as many as 200 Jewish settlers want to see Prime Minister Ariel Sharon dead because of his plan to dismantle settlements in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

MPs who took part in today’s closed-door session of the parliamentary Defence and Foreign Affairs Committee said Shin Bet chief Aviv Dichter said that 150-200 extremists among the 230,000 settlers were speaking and writing in violent terms.

But he told the committee that his agents had not uncovered any specific assassination plot.

“He said there were dozens of people, with the backup of maybe 150 more, who want to see the prime minister dead,” said committee member Ran Cohen of the dovish Yahad Party. “I would put it that they want the prime minister murdered.”

Settler leader Benzi Lieberman said Dichter may have been overstating the threat, mindful of the intelligence community’s failure to prevent the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

“He should arrest and charge these people, we cannot let something like political murder repeat itself,” Lieberman said. “I think that he is to an extent covering himself.”

The pro-settler National Union Party issued a statement calling on Dichter to either take action or resign.

Dichter said that while Palestinian suspects could be rounded up and imprisoned without trial, he could not do the same with Israelis.

“If he needs legislative tools he must ask us for them,” MP Haim Ramon said.