TEL AVIV, March 13: Israel’s cabinet adopted a report on Sunday charting state complicity in the building of scores of unauthorised settler outposts in the West Bank but set no timetable for their removal under a US-backed peace plan.

“Evacuation of the unauthorised outposts is part of Israel’s commitments under the roadmap,” said Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, giving no clue when he would fulfil a long-standing pledge to tear down the encampments on occupied land.

In broadcast remarks at a cabinet session that accepted the findings of the government-commissioned report by a vote of 18-1, Sharon said a ministerial committee “would examine the ways to implement” its recommendations.

The panel will report back to the cabinet in 90 days, government officials said.

The report, issued on Tuesday, said 105 settler outposts, built without formal government permission, had spread in the West Bank with state funding and military protection in “blatant violations of the law”.

It recommended dismantling the outposts and possible charges against officials who helped them mushroom as part of a settler campaign, once encouraged by Sharon, to grab West Bank hilltops to block the creation of a viable Palestinian state.

Israeli officials said it was unlikely evacuations would begin in earnest before the removal of all 21 Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip and four of 120 in the West Bank slated to begin on July 20 and to be completed in up to four weeks.

“Evacuating outposts is not on the agenda at the moment,” because of the planned pullout, said an Israeli official who briefed reporters after the weekly meeting.

“We are going to take a very difficult step, disengagement from Gaza and the northern West Bank, and to add friction over removing outposts would be a great mistake,” Health Minister Dan Naveh of Sharon’s rightist Likud party told Israeli television.

PRESSURE: Hundreds of settlers live in the unauthorised outposts, some of which are no more than one or two caravans.

Israel’s failure to scrap them has irked US President George W. Bush, a main backer of the roadmap.

But Sharon confidants have said the United States was aware their removal now could fuel more anger among opponents of the Gaza pullout, which Washington supports.

Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat, responding to the cabinet decision, called for international pressure to ensure Israel carried out its road map commitment to dismantle all settler outposts built after Sharon took office in March 2001.

The report’s author, former chief state prosecutor Talia Sasson, said 24 outposts were built after that date and 71 before. She was unable to determine when 10 others were erected.

Health Minister Naveh said the designated cabinet committee would permit authorised Jewish settlements to continue public building without needing explicit cabinet approval.

“We should not dry up all the settlements just because of the illegal outposts,” Naveh said.

Communications Minister Dalia Itzik, a member of the centre-left Labour Party, said: “I don’t understand why a committee has to be set up. These outposts are illegal.”

Palestinian officials said the report had hardened their concern that gaining Gaza would come at the expense of Israel’s effective annexation of parts of the West Bank.

The international community views all Israeli settlement on occupied land as illegal. Israel disputes this.—Reuters