AZARIYA (West Bank ): On the ragged edge of this hillside Palestinian village, shopkeeper Akram abu Shamsieh gazed in the direction of Maale Adumim, the West Bank’s largest Jewish settlement, a lushly landscaped enclave where the din of construction rarely falls silent.

“It never stops: the building, the expansion,” Abu Shamsieh said bleakly. “Sometimes I think it will never end.” With the last Jewish settlers evacuated from the Gaza Strip on Monday, Palestinians are celebrating the imminent hand-over of the strip of land beside the Mediterranean. But they fear that even as they gain Gaza, they could be poised to lose large tracts of the West Bank, the heartland of their hoped-for state. The sun-baked hills just east of Jerusalem, where the Palestinians of Azariya and Jews of Maale Adumim bump up against one another, are a case in point.

Home to more than 30,000 people, Maale Adumim has more the look of a prosperous, and permanent, small city than the frontier foothold the word “settlement” might suggest. Altogether, nearly a quarter-million Israeli Jews live in more than 100 settlements in the West Bank, scattered from north to south in communities large and small.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has said publicly on many occasions, with tacit US blessing, that he intends to keep the biggest of the settlements built by his nation on land seized in the 1967 Middle East War. “There will be building in the settlement blocks,” he told the Jerusalem Post newspaper in an interview published on Monday. “I will build.”

The prime minister has left open the possibility of relinquishing some West Bank settlements, particularly those that are remote and difficult to defend, but only in the context of cementing Israel’s grip on enclaves he considers to be of strategic value. In conjunction with the Gaza initiative, Israel today is to evacuate the last two of four small settlements in the northern reaches of the West Bank.

During the nearly five years of the Palestinian uprising, or intifada, talks between Israel and the Palestinians languished. Meanwhile, construction in Jewish settlements burgeoned, despite US and other nations’ opposition to the expansion.

In April, Israel drew an unusually strong rebuke from President Bush over plans to add 3,600 new housing units in Maale Adumim. Sharon brushed off the criticism. Weeks before the Gaza pullout began, Israeli authorities also issued tenders for six dozen new homes in the West Bank settlement of Betar Ilit and announced plans for a new Jewish neighborhood in the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City.

The settlement expansion sets the stage for what could be a dangerous clash of expectations in the wake of the Gaza withdrawal: Israel hoping to preclude Palestinian territorial claims by bulking up existing settlement blocks, and Palestinians continuing to insist that nothing should be done that would prejudice the outcome of eventual negotiations on terms of statehood.

Last week, as the Gaza pullout began, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas called settlement construction in the West Bank a “significant obstacle to peace.” “It must be stopped immediately,” he told a crowd at a rally celebrating the withdrawal. The Palestinian militant group Hamas, the biggest rival of Abbas’ Fatah movement, took a far more fiery and crowd-pleasing approach.

“We’ll liberate Jerusalem and the West Bank too — not with talk, with armed struggle,” a masked member of Hamas’ military wing told reporters in Gaza City. With the spotlight focused for months on the Gaza Strip, little attention has been paid to the proliferation of illegal hilltop outposts in the West Bank by Israel.

There were more than 100 of them at last count, according to Israeli peace groups. Built by some of the same ultranationalist Jewish youths who flocked to Gaza in recent weeks to try to prevent the withdrawal, these offshoots of existing settlements, usually consisting of little more than a few battered trailers and a makeshift synagogue, are meant to lay claim to far larger tracts of land.

Israel is obliged under the first stages of the US-backed “road map” peace plan to dismantle the outposts, but Israeli authorities’ attempts to do so have been abortive. Even some members of Sharon’s government fear that Israel is squandering goodwill generated by the Gaza pullout by letting the outposts multiply unchecked.

“Israel must implement its promise to evacuate the illegal outposts,” Housing Minister Yitzhak Herzog of the Labour Party said at a Cabinet meeting on Sunday. “The [Gaza pullout] represents extraordinary momentum for progress in the entire region; we should make use of this time to embark on peace moves.”

But many political observers believe Sharon is unlikely to make even the smallest concession to the Palestinians in coming months as he girds for battle with his Likud Party’s right wing. —Dawn/The LAT News Service