Israel Begins Fencing Off Palestinian Areas

The six bulldozers belong to the Israeli contracting firm of Y Ze'evi. Last week they rolled up to the army checkpoint at Salem junction, outside the northern West Bank city of Jenin, and began flattening an area of scrub.

When they are finished, Y Ze'evi's labourers - mainly Israeli Arabs - will have flattened nearly six miles of land and will have installed an electric fence of the same length. It will separate Jenin, whose refugee camp was devastated during April's Israeli military incursions, from its Jewish neighbours.

The fence, which will run from Salem to the nearby Palestinian town of Umm el-Fahm, will take two months to build. It will be the first section of a controversial 70-mile fence that will separate Israeli towns to the west of the former "green line" - the pre-1967 border between Israel and the then Jordanian-controlled West Bank - from Israeli-occupied Palestinian areas. It will run from the northern tip of the West Bank to Megiddo.

Earlier this week, Israel's ministry of defence confirmed that it had secured the services of a dozen contractors like Y Ze'evi, who it anticipates will take between 10 months and a year to finish building.

The fence will be a precursor to a more ambitious barrier, 280 miles long, including 30 miles in the Jerusalem area.

Officially this barrier, which will incorporate obstacles and ditches, is to prevent Palestinian terrorists attacking Israel. Unofficially, its opponents say, it will form a new political border along the green line.

Palestinian opponents say it will also continue the encroachment of Israel into the occupied territories of the West Bank, 42% of whose land has already been effectively annexed by Israeli settlement.

The fence will wind its way in an arbitrary fashion along a spine of mountains, enclosing Palestinian villages and towns unlucky enough to be on the wrong side, and leaving a number of Israeli settlements on the other, eastern, side.

The full scope of the plan for the £270m fence was revealed this week in a briefing for Knesset members by the director general of Israel's ministry of defence, Amos Yaron.

The construction of the fence, ironically, is one thing on which Israeli settlers and Palestinians can agree, although for different reasons.

"We oppose a political fence," said Yehoshua Mor-Yosef, a spokesman for the Jewish settlers' council, which claims the occupied territories as part of the historical land of Israel.

Members of the group are afraid that the fence will become a defacto border along the frontiers Israel held before it captured these lands.

"If they build a fence along the 1967 lines, we are against it and will do whatever we can to stop it," Mr Mor-Yosef said.

Palestinians, on the other hand, fear the seizure of mainly Palestinian land. Palestinian villages and towns that will be on the western side of the fence are worried that they will be unable to take produce for sale on the West Bank.

It will also make it almost impossible to cross by foot into Israel, something many workers do illegally before dawn every day.

The head of the Shin Bet security service, however, recently told a parliamentary committee that militants in the Gaza Strip had failed to carry out any bombings since that area was fenced off.

The most controversial element of the plan is likely to be the 30 miles of fencing in the region of Jerusalem, the majority of which is likely to be concentrated between Jewish settlements to the north of Bethlehem. Already, fences have appeared, sealing areas on the outskirts of Ramallah from the outlying neighbourhoods of Jerusalem.