AL KHALIL, Nov 17: Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said on Sunday that Israel must enlarge the zone it administers in the divided West Bank city of Al Khalil following an attack which killed 12 Israelis, nine of them soldiers, and triggered a major reoccupation of the city.

A day after Israeli forces swarmed back into the Palestinian-administered areas of the flashpoint city which it had quit just weeks ago, Jewish settlers started doing just that, establishing an outpost between the settlement of Kiryat Arba and the Jewish enclave in the city itself, a settler leader said.

Sharon said during a tour of the city that the army “must ensure territorial continuity” between Kiryat Arba, on the eastern edge of Al Khalil, and Jewish enclaves in the city centre.

At the same time, settler leader Zvi Katsover said dozens of youths had already moved in to set up a wildcat outpost — the basis for a future settlement — between the two.

“We have created a new settlement outpost, and it would have been a historic sin not to have made use of this occasion,” said Katsover, referring to the Islamic Jihad attack on Friday night that killed 12 people, including three settlers.

“We have to cleanse the ground to ensure an Israeli territorial continuity between Kiryat Arba and Al Khalil,” he said at the funeral of the three settler security guards in Al Khalil.

It was seen as an implicit threat that Palestinians living in the stretch between the settlement and the enclave would be forced from their homes.

Katsover said the project involves building 1,000 housing units in the area. “I trust Sharon” to implement the project, he said.

The new moves set alarm bells ringing among Palestinian officials.

Al Khalil’s Palestinian mayor, Mustafa al-Natsheh, said the announcement was “part of an old Israeli plan which was immediately implemented after the 1967 war” with its Arab neighbours, when the Jewish state seized the West Bank from Jordan.

Just hours after the attack, Israeli armoured vehicles piled back into Palestinian-administered zones of the city of more than 120,000 people.

Israel has always assured the administration of Palestinian neighbourhoods which lie on the edge of the heavily-guarded Jewish enclaves in the city centre where some 600 hardline settlers live.

But after two years of bitter conflict with the Palestinians, Israel’s right-wing government says the 1993 autonomy accords which laid down the division of Al Khalil are dead.

Since Israel’s national unity coalition collapsed last month after the centre-left Labour party walked out, there have been increasing calls for a tougher response to Palestinian attacks, especially after a shooting last week at a kibbutz inside Israel that killed five people, including two small children.

But Sharon is wary of incurring US anger by stirring up tensions in the region as Washington piles pressure on Iraq.

His newly-appointed foreign minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, however, has wooed the powerful right wing of the two men’s Likud party by calling for Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to be expelled.

Sharon and Netanyahu will vie for the party’s leadership in primary elections at the end of this month, with the winner tipped to emerge as the new prime minister after snap parliamentary elections in January.—AFP