BETHLEHEM, West Bank, Feb 18, 03 (CWNews.com) - Israel plans to divide Bethlehem with a 25-foot security wall to protect Jews visiting Rachel's Tomb, according to Palestinians on Tuesday.
The Palestinians said a senior Israeli army officer told them part of their neighborhood in the city of Christ's birth would segregated into an expanded security zone being built around nearby Jerusalem to seal it off from Palestinian terrorists. About half of the Palestinians in Bethlehem are Christian and the area around the tomb is mainly Christian.
«You will be able to come and go from your neighborhood with permits through checkpoints in a perfectly respectable manner,» Colonel Jamal Salman, an Israeli Druze speaking Arabic, told dozens of anxious residents in a meeting with local residents. «There will be no evacuation of residents. There will be no changes in your lives initially. I cannot tell you when the work will begin but when it does a wall will be built,» said Salman. The residents were told that large portions of their property would be requisitioned for the wall.
«We did not meet you to discuss this (security wall) but to say we oppose them in principle,» Bethlehem Mayor Hanna Nasser told Salman as merchants who fear the wall will kill their businesses shouted and gesticulated around them. «You are using the pretext of instability to expand the boundaries of Jerusalem at the expense of Palestinian territory and hundreds of people will be in danger of falling into a ghetto behind concrete and barbed wire,» the mayor said.
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18. februar 2003