Israel Won't Be Deterred By Iraq

An Israeli Cabinet minister said Friday that Israel won't stop fighting Palestinian militants, but will take America's situation with Iraq into account in its own terror war.

The minister, Dan Naveh, from Sharon's hardline Likud Party, said Israel would take U.S. concerns into account in the period leading up to a possible U.S. strike against Iraq, but that "we can't allow a situation where because of events in Iraq, the Palestinian side will feel they have a certain immunity."

On the other hand, Naveh said, "we need to weigh decisions carefully and act wisely so as not to create a situation where a flare-up here hurts the primary American effort to hit Iraq."

Meantime, Israeli soldiers removed 17 illegal Jewish settlement outposts in the West Bank this week, but both settlers and their critics said it was mostly a meaningless exercise.

The outposts were unoccupied and a settler spokesman said trouble could come next week when soldiers get around to the occupied ones.

In the Gaza Strip, two Palestinians planted a bomb near the Jewish settlement of Rafah Yam, the military said. Soldiers opened fire, but the two got away, apparently unharmed.

Over the past four years, Jewish settlers in the West Bank have been taking over hilltops near their settlements, posting old buses, trailers, mobile homes and portable generators at the sites. The settlers claim that the outposts are extensions of their existing communities, though some are several miles from the original sites.

Palestinians say all the settlements, not just the outposts, are illegal encroachment on land they claim for a state. The United States has said that the settlements are an obstacle to peace.

The Israeli Defense Ministry said that 17 of 24 outposts it slated for dismantling have been removed. Yehoshua Mor-Yosef, spokesman for the settler leadership, charged that the operation was a political move by Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, who is facing a challenge for leadership of the moderate Labor Party. "This is all about the Labor primaries," he said.

Mor-Yosef said most of the outposts slated for dismantling were uninhabited. "Next week they'll get to the inhabited ones," he said. "That's where there will be trouble." The leadership appealed to settlers not to confront the soldiers.

Settlement critics also scoffed at the operation. Yariv Oppenheimer of the Peace Now movement said that there are 105 illegal settlement points, and by listing 24 "small, marginal and mostly empty" sites for evacuation, the Defense Ministry is giving backhanded approval to the other ones.

Israel TV showed footage of settlers moving back into one of the sites that was evacuated earlier this week, and the Haaretz daily said Friday that settlers had returned to a point near the city of Nablus that was dismantled on Thursday.

More than 200,000 Israelis live in about 150 settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, territories Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast war. During the two-year Palestinian-Israeli conflict, settlers have become frequent targets of Palestinian roadside ambushes, and large numbers of Israeli soldiers are posted in the territories to protect the settlers.

Polls show that while many Israelis favor dismantling settlements as part of a peace accord, they also feel that evacuating settlements now would encourage more Palestinian violence.

Palestinians charge that the settlements are a key cause of friction and say extremist settlers often attack Palestinians and destroy property.

Also Friday, the Israeli daily Maariv reported that Israeli and Palestinian officials have reached agreement on a plan to end the conflict, along the lines of proposals made by Sharon, but Palestinians denied the report. They said Israel's incursion into Yasser Arafat's compound last month stopped efforts to arrange meetings.

Maariv said that while in Moscow, Arafat's deputy, Mahmoud Abbas, sharply criticized Arafat and called for an end to Palestinian violence. Abbas is known to oppose the Palestinian uprising, officials said, but he has not criticized Arafat. l

Violence continued in the region on Thursday. In Tel Aviv, a Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up at a bus stop, killing himself and a 71-year-old Israeli woman. The bomber tried to board a bus but fell to the ground. The bus driver and a doctor pinned him down until bystanders ran away and then fled themselves. Then the bomber ran toward a group of people and set off his explosives. Among those present were soldiers, but most were unarmed, witnesses said.

The bomber was Rafik Hamad, 30, a Hamas member and father of four from the West Bank town of Qalqiliya, a relative said. There was no immediate claim of responsibility from the group.

In the Gaza Strip, two Palestinian teenagers were killed after a night-long clash between Palestinians and Israeli soldiers near Rafah on the Gaza-Egypt border. After midnight, Israeli tanks moved into a refugee camp. The Israeli military said soldiers were looking for tunnels used by Palestinians to smuggle arms in from Egypt. The deaths brought to 20 the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza this week.