AL QUDS, June 12: Israel is start work soon on a massive fence around the West Bank to bottle up Palestinian would-be suicide bombers, but critics doubt the project will go far in making the Jewish state safer.

The Israeli defence ministry said ON Tuesday the work would begin at the end of the week or the beginning of next week between the towns of Kfar Salem and Kfar Kassem in the northern West Bank.

The montage of fences, trenches and walls decked out with electronic surveillance devices will eventually extend 350 kilometres along the “green line” separating the West Bank and Israel.

The ministry said the barrier, similar to structures in place along the borders with Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, would be designed to “prevent the infiltration of terrorists and explosives into Israel.”

“No wall will prevent people getting through to Israel,” countered Jim Lederman, an expert who has written several articles on the question.

“It can’t be totally secure. It can only slow down the amount of explosives coming through,” Lederman said.

But he said the wall could provide a psychological crutch to those who are rattled by the suicide bombings in Israel. “They will feel safer even if it doesn’t change anything in the situation.”

For Lederman, the main consequence of the fence will be to put another nail into the already badly punctured Palestinian economy.

A UN and World Bank report published in April said any move to tighten the net around the Palestinian territories would “increase poverty and despair” and encourage the suicide attacks the Israelis are trying to prevent.

Israeli incursions in the territories since the beginning of the Palestinian intifada, or uprising, 20 months ago have triggered a record increase in unemployment, the report said.

Forty-five percent of the nearly three million Palestinians living on the West Bank and Gaza Strip are struggling below the poverty line.

“The Palestinians will develop an island economy, which can’t exist,” said Lederman. “They need trading partners.”

Measures to quarantine the Palestinians are also hurting the Israeli economy indirectly by preventing residents of the West Bank from crossing over to Israel to work.

Before the intifada, more than 100,000 Palestinians worked in Israel, mainly in agriculture, construction or hotels.

The usefulness of spending an estimated 200 million dollars for a defensive barrier has also been sharply questioned in Israel, which is going through its own economic crisis.

Most of the 200,000 Jewish settlers on the West Bank are likewise opposed to mounting a structure which they say could heighten the isolation of their communities from Israel.

But the most delicate element of the fence project is its political implications.

Critics say that any extended wall would end up turning the “green line” into the official border between Israel and a future Palestinian state — a notion that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s government categorically rejects.—AFP