Israeli Fence Draws Criticism From US, Arafat

The United States and Yasser Arafat criticized Israel's plans to erect a security fence along a porous West Bank frontier through which Palestinian suicide bombers slip into Israeli cities.

The Palestinian president also rejected Monday scathing comments by U.S. national security adviser Condoleezza Rice that his Palestinian Authority was corrupt, supported terror and was no model for a future state.

While the State Department and Arafat took aim at the project launched Sunday to erect a 70-mile (110-km) barrier straddling the border with the West Bank, Israel let its guns do the talking in its battle against Palestinian militants.

In an attack Palestinians called an assassination, Israeli soldiers in a position overlooking the West Bank village of El Khader shot dead a militant from the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a group behind suicide bombings that have killed dozens in Israel.

At a daily briefing in Washington, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the United States was worried that the Israeli fence, to be built over the next year, would make life harder for ordinary Palestinians, when Israel should be removing the barriers restricting their movements.

"The issue of borders between Israel living side-by-side with a future Palestinian state is one that needs to be resolved through negotiation," Boucher said.

The United States, he added, "always opposed unilateral attempts to try to decide these issues."

Arafat called the construction project "an act of racism."

Palestinians fear Israel will seize West Bank land as it marks out the barrier and that it will stop Palestinians from entering Israel, where thousands work illegally after eluding Israeli roadblocks.

Israeli right-wingers opposed the fence for another reason, saying it could set a de facto border for a Palestinian state and weaken what they see as their biblical claim to land captured in the 1967 Middle East war.

(China Daily June 19, 2002)