Jerusalem – In the biggest and most disruptive protests yet against Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s plan to relinquish the Gaza Strip, thousands of right-wing demonstrators snarled evening rush-hour traffic across the country Monday, using burning tires and their own prone bodies to block highways and urban thoroughfares.
Police detained some 300 protesters, some of them barely in their teens.
Israeli officials, meanwhile, disclosed that work would begin in the next few weeks to extend Israel’s security barrier to enclose the West Bank’s largest Jewish settlement, a move that could raise the ire of the Bush administration. The United States has spoken out against Israel’s plans to build more homes in Maale Adumim, the settlement in question.
The rapid timetable for enclosing the settlement, reported in Monday’s editions of the Maariv newspaper and confirmed by government sources, appeared to be part of a wider effort by Sharon to consolidate Israel’s hold on major Jewish population centers in the West Bank before the Gaza pullout.
As the mid-August pullout date approaches, opponents are adopting ever more strident methods. In addition to mounting coordinated highway protests in locales from the northern coastal town of Netanya to the southern desert city of Beersheva, demonstrators threw stones at police in Jerusalem, a tactic unused until now.
And for the second day in a row, Israeli bomb squads rushed to investigate two suspicious parcels planted in public places and found to contain only rocks – and notes protesting the pullout. The withdrawal “will blow up in our faces,” one message said.
Israeli authorities disclosed Monday that in recent weeks, five right-wing activists were detained and questioned in connection with alleged plots to strike the Al Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem’s walled Old City with anti-tank missiles, grenades or a small dronelike aircraft.
The site, which is holy to Muslims and Jews, has been a flashpoint for violence, and any attack on it would undoubtedly spark fury throughout the Muslim world.
The five men were conditionally released, Israel Radio said, apparently because they had not yet taken any concrete steps toward carrying out a strike.
Israeli officials have for months expressed fears that extremist settlers or their supporters would try to block the uprooting of 21 settlements in Gaza, plus four smaller ones in the northern West Bank.
