UNITED NATIONS, Sept 24: Israel is building its barrier on West Bank land not to keep out suicide bombers but to confiscate the land and put pressure on Palestinians to move away, a UN human rights investigator said on Friday.

"There is no compelling evidence that suicide bombers could not have been as effectively prevented from entering Israel if the wall had been built along the Green Line - the accepted border between Israel and Palestine - or within the Israeli side of the Green Line," John Dugard said in a report to the UN General Assembly.

"The course of the wall clearly indicates that its purpose is to incorporate as many settlers as possible into Israel," said Dugard, a South African law professor charged with monitoring the Palestinian territories by the Geneva-based U.N. Commission on Human Rights.

"This is borne out by the fact that some 80 per cent of settlers in the West Bank will be included on the Israeli side of the wall," he said. Israeli officials say that the 375-mile-long (600-km) array of razor-tipped fences and concrete walls, of which 200 km is completed, is needed to keep out suicide bombers and that terrorist attacks inside Israel have already dropped dramatically as a result of its construction.

Palestinians have portrayed it as a land-grab aimed at dashing their hopes for statehood. The General Assembly in July adopted a resolution demanding that the barrier be torn down, in line with a nonbinding advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice that its route was illegal.

Israel has said it would refuse to comply with the court opinion and the assembly resolution. But it has also announced it was reviewing the barrier's planned route in response to a June ruling of its High Court.

The Israeli court said that parts of the barrier had to be rerouted to eliminate undue hardship on Palestinians living near it. Dugard dismissed Israel's stated reasons for the barrier.

"More constructive explanations" were that it aimed "to expand Israel's territory" and "compel Palestinian residents living between the wall and the Green Line and adjacent to the wall, but separated from their land by the wall, to leave their homes and start a new life elsewhere in the West Bank by making life intolerable for them," he said.

"Rich agricultural land and water resources have been seized along the Green Line and incorporated into Israel," he said. Meanwhile, in Al Quds an Israeli woman was killed in a Palestinian mortar strike on Friday on a Jewish settlement in Gaza, as Israel prepared to mark Judaism's most solemn day of Yom Kippur amid fears of suicide bombings.

The attack was slammed by a close aide to Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon who accused the Palestinians of wanting to hinder a planned withdrawal from the Gaza Strip next year.

"A woman was killed by a mortar shell that landed on her house in the Neve Dekalim settlement" in the southern Gaza Strip, an Israeli army spokesman told AFP, without giving the victim's name. He said the mortars were fired from the nearby Palestinian town of Khan Yunis.

Local media named the victim as 24-year-old Tiferet Tratner, an Al Quds resident on a visit to the settlement. The latest death raised to 4,337 the number of people killed in the four-year-old intifada, including 3,317 Palestinians and 949 Israelis, according to an AFP count.

Mortars were also fired at the Morag settlement, likewise in southern Gaza, without causing any casualties. Palestinian security sources said Israeli tanks fired on Khan Yunis in a swift apparent reprisal for the attacks, both of which were claimed by the radical Islamic Jihad and its larger rival Hamas in telephone calls to AFP.

"The Palestinians carry on with their never-ending murderous operations with the apparent intent to prevent Israel from seeing through its unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip," said Sharon's aide, speaking on condition of anonymity.

"The Palestinians want the conflict to go on but Israel will do its utmost to respond to these provocations and stop these murderous attacks," he added.

Sharon plans on dismantling all 21 Gaza settlements and another four on the northern West Bank by September 2005 despite fervent opposition from Israel's ultra-nationalist and settler fringe. -Reuter/AFP