BEIT EL (West Bank), June 14: Jewish settlers in the West Bank are demanding more military protection from Palestinian attacks but the army is reluctant to defend isolated wildcat outposts that have sprung up in recent years with tacit government approval.

The issue has split the main settlements, with some residents asking whether it is right to invest money and lives in defending the isolated offhsoots, often consisting of no more than a few trailers or tents.

Only a few kilometres from Beit El is Givat Assaf, created early last year as a memorial to a local settler who had been killed by Palestinian gunmen.

Like the 60-odd outposts that have sprung up before a blind government eye in recent years, Givat Assaf is tiny and rudimentary. Only five families live there, in prefabricated housing that they have thrown up.

The aim of such implantations is to secure recognition of them by the government, and then develop the intervening land between them and the “mother colony”, extending the settlers’ grip on the West Bank.

The international community, for its part, considers all settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories to be illegal.

Residents of Beit El met to protest on Monday after the army decided to stop protecting Givat Assaf. An army officer confirmed to AFP that reservists who had been defending both locations were only being replaced at Beit El.

Beit El Mayor Israel Rosenberg said he is worried by these developments and is pressing the army for continued protection.

Some residents of Beit El however ask whether it is fair for the army’s already stretched resources be extended to defending unauthorized settlements.

“We have already got enough problems protecting ourselves, so why invest in some families who have not obtained permission to live at that spot,” asks one woman who has lived in Beit El for 10 years.—AFP