Word: settlements
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...what might have been a revenge attack for the killing of a four-month-old Palestinian girl and the wounding of at least one other infant. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said the "horrifying murders" of the two 14-year-old boys, one an American citizen, from the Tekoa settlement on the West Bank marked a new escalation in the conflict. Palestinian officials condemned the killings as well, but neither side offered a way out of the spiral of death. The widening violence also saw two Romanian migrant workers killed by a bomb while repairing Israel's border fence with Gaza...
...trial still awaits settlement while the court collects what documentary evidence exists...
...Diplomatic jockeying over a cease-fire appeared to be intensifying on the eve of the latest attack, with the Palestinian Authority endorsing the recommendations of the report by former Senator George Mitchell on the causes of violence and Israel moving towards a compromise on the vexed question of settlement construction in the West Bank and Gaza. The current cease-fire proposals in both the Mitchell report and an initiative from Egypt and Jordan both require a freeze on construction of Israeli settlements as a prelude to talks. While Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, longtime champion of the settlement movement, rejects...
...Foreign Minister Shimon Peres is currently trying to find a way around that by saying Israel won't build new settlements, just build more structures within the borders of existing settlements. But the thing Palestinians don't trust about the Israeli idea of "natural growth" of these settlements is that it has often meant expanding a settlement's territory from one hill to the next. And when that happens, for the Palestinians that's another hill lost, and another set of valleys around that hill subject to all kinds of restrictions. So for the Palestinians, "natural growth...
...very easy position, both because of diplomatic pressure because of pressure from his coalition allies in the Labor Party. He's hoping Peres will find some sort of diplomatic formulation that will let them get around the call for a settlement freeze. Otherwise, he looks as if he's prepared to brass it out. Israel has faced the same criticism over settlements from both the Clinton administration and the previous Bush administration. But the difference is that those Israeli governments weren't faced with such severe violence...