MIDEAST Israel pledges to uproot outposts

A government report accuses ministries of supporting illegal settlements.
LOS ANGELES TIMES
JERUSALEM -- Israel pledged Sunday to uproot 24 illegal Jewish settlement outposts in the West Bank. But it didn't say when, and did not specify what would happen to scores of other unauthorized outposts.
The decision at Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's weekly Cabinet meeting came days after a government-commissioned report accused various Israeli ministries of systematically funneling millions of dollars to the outposts, which usually lie within a mile of established Jewish settlements.
The Cabinet formally adopted the findings of the report, written by former state prosecutor Talia Sasson, which described how successive Israeli governments allowed 105 unauthorized outposts -- some of them encampments consisting of a few rusting trailers, some thriving communities that are home to dozens of families -- to be built on West Bank hilltops over the past 10 years.
The outposts are intended to stake a claim to additional tracts of the West Bank, regarded by settlers as their biblical birthright but seen by Palestinians as the heartland of their future state. Young messianic Jewish settlers who populate the outposts have forcibly resisted past efforts by the Israeli army to evict them.
No timetable
More than 18 months ago, with the inauguration of the U.S.-supported peace plan known as the "road map," Israel promised to remove illegal outposts. But it has made only a few abortive attempts to do so.
Sunday's Cabinet decision set no timetable for uprooting the 24 outposts set up during Sharon's term in office. Nor did it address the fate of as many as 81 others built before the prime minister took office in spring 2001.
Sasson, the report's author, deemed all of them illegal.
The 77-year-old prime minister, who was once the chief patron of the settlement movement, said in a terse statement that "the dismantling of unauthorized outposts is part of the Israeli commitment within the road map." The Cabinet, by an 18-1 vote, ordered that a special panel be set up to decide within 90 days how to implement the report's recommendations.