Israeli charges deceit on outposts

JERUSALEM – In a display likely to increase U.S. displeasure with Israel, an opposition lawmaker and former general Monday showed photos of four West Bank outposts he said proves the government is deceiving Washington by expanding the enclaves instead of taking them down.

In new fighting, Israeli troops raided the West Bank city of Nablus and a Gaza refugee camp early Tuesday. Two Palestinians, including a teenager, were killed and at least four soldiers wounded in exchanges of fire, the army and medics said.

The settlement watchdog group Peace Now said it has counted 53 outposts Israel is required to dismantle under the U.S.-backed “road map” peace plan — or nearly twice the 28 named in a government list handed to the Americans last week.

“There is a clear-cut case of flagrant deception and a breaking of the promise to the Americans,” legislator Ephraim Sneh from the Labor Party told reporters in displaying the “before” and “after” photos.

U.S. officials in Israel declined comment. However, they have publicly rebuked Israel in recent weeks, a sign of growing impatience with its handling of the outposts, seen as seeds of future settlements.

Asaf Shariv, an aide to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, said the government’s list of 28 is accurate and declined comment on the deception charge. Officials said last week that of the outposts on Israel’s list, fewer than half would be removed, and others were being “legalized.”

Also Monday, rabbis representing Jewish settlers accused the head of Israel’s Shin Bet security service of inciting against them. The Shin Bet chief, Avi Dichter, had told the Cabinet he was concerned about growing militancy among those opposed to the government’s planned evacuation of 8,000 settlers in 2005, as part of a withdrawal from Gaza and parts of the West Bank.

Some settler leaders and rabbis in the West Bank and Gaza have portrayed settlement evacuation as a crime, implying that violent resistance is justified, while insisting they are not urging settlers to break the law.

In the latest such comment, Uri Elitzur, a settler leader and former top aide to ex-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told Israel Radio on Monday that to remove someone from his soil is “worse than rape.”

The heated debate dominated Israeli talk shows. The threat posed by Jewish extremists has been an issue since Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995 by an ultranationalist Jew. At the time, several rabbis were suspected — though never convicted — of having encouraged the assassin with their rulings.