TEL AVIV, Feb 21: Israel will tear down part of its controversial West Bank barrier on the eve of World Court hearings challenging its legality, officials said on Saturday.
Workers will start dismantling an eight-kilometre section of the barrier in the northern West Bank on Sunday after soldiers removed a watch-tower, cables and lighting from the area on Saturday.
Hundreds of Palestinians protested in the West Bank against the barrier on Saturday, a day before a "Day of Rage" they have called to mark the start of the International Court of Justice hearings in The Hague.
"The intensive work that we have done has started to produce pressure (on Israel)," said Palestinian Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath. "This work should continue until all the wall is removed."
Israeli Defence Ministry Director General Amos Yaron said the timing of the removal was unrelated to the court hearing and had been planned months in advance.
He said original plans had the barrier crossing through an inhabited area of a Palestinian village and would have forced the demolition of 40 Palestinian homes. After almost two years of local lawsuits, the decision was made to scrap it.
"(The decision) has nothing to do with The Hague - it was planned in advance," Mr Yaron told Army Radio. "We work according to security concerns and we take into account what goes on the world and consider the needs of the Palestinians."
He said removing the barrier east of the Palestinian village of Baka al Sharqiya, where it has separated thousands of Palestinians from families and jobs in the rest of the West Bank, would cost about 20 million shekels (4.47 million dollars), and not eight million dollars as quoted in media reports.
ROUTE CRITICIZED: Defence Ministry spokeswoman Rachel Niedak-Ashkenazi said the permanent barrier in the area would be along the frontier held by Israel before it captured the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the 1967 war.
The planned 728-km barrier, most of which is unbuilt, has been criticized internationally over plans for it to cut deep into the West Bank to encircle Jewish settlements rather than follow the 1967 frontier.
Israeli National Security Council head Giora Eiland, who is drawing up Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plans for a unilateral removal of some West Bank and Gaza Strip settlements, said basing the barrier route on the 1967 border would give it political significance and posed a security concern.
In The Hague, Israeli and Palestinian lobby groups gathered at the World Court to prepare for the hearings. With protests by both sides planned for next week, Dutch police have erected lines of barricades around the entrance to the court.
The World Court's ruling is non-binding, but Israel fears the United Nations General Assembly - which asked for the advisory opinion and where pro-Palestinian sentiment is strong - could use the ruling to lobby for sanctions against it.-Reuters