Bil’in sues 2 Canadian firms for building in West Bank settlement

By Akiva Eldar, and News Agencies

The head of the Bili`n local council has slammed Israel`s proposals for alternate routes for the West Bank security fence, saying that the government is treating recent Supreme Court rulings as though they were `weightless particles of dust.`

This week, after a 10-month delay, prosecutors presented the Supreme Court with a draw up of the alternate fence routes, which Bili`n local council head Ahmed Issa Abdallah Yassin said will return only 200 of the reported 2000 dunams of land belonging to the local council that he says were expropriated under the original fence route.

Yassin added that the alternate routes proposed by the state have belittled the Supreme Court`s decision, `out of the belief that justices will not press the state an additional time to help Bili`n farmers and will not rework the fence`s route again.`

Yassin said that in the meantime, the state is allowing building developers to create facts on the ground and that in another two months time, `they will be able to debate new security stipulations that will be influenced by building projects which will by then be complete, leaving them `no choice` but to rework the fence with these developments in mind.`

Attorney Michael Sfarad, who is representing petitioners against the new routes, says that the reworked plans for the fence will harm the residents of Bili`n even more than the original route.

In September 2007, the Supreme Court ruled that the state must remove a 1,700 meter section of the fence that runs next to Bili`n, and build an alternative route. The justices stipulated in their ruling that the section of the fence in question had expropriated Palestinian land, with the implicit purpose of expanding the nearby settlement of Modi`in Ilit.

Supreme Court Chief Justice Dorit Beinisch on Wednesday stated that the matter of the new fence routes will be debated in the near future by a special panel of three justices.

Also on Wednesday, the Israeli human rights group B`Tselem charged that the government has not changed the course of its West Bank separation barrier, in defiance of rulings from Supreme Court.

Palestinian tries to topple West Bank barrier using bulldozer

On Wednesday, a Palestinian man tried to ram a tractor into the fence police said, as 10 people were hurt in separate protests against the barrier.

The unidentified man drove up to a concrete barricade at Qalandia, a military checkpoint outside Ramallah, but turned back toward the Palestinian-ruled city after being confronted by border guards, Israeli police spokesman Mickey Rosenfeld said.

`They used riot-dispersal means to make him leave the scene. I understand there were no damage or injuries,` he said.

In Na`alin, a West Bank village that has seen weeks of demonstrations and Israel Defense Forces clampdowns as a section of the barrier goes up nearby, soldiers injured seven protesters during scuffles, witnesses and medical officials said