As expected, the State Department on Monday deplored Israel’s plans to deport four Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and urged it to rescind the order.
Such deportations “cannot possibly contribute to the development of a peace process,” said State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler.
But she added that, based on the deportation plans alone, she could not draw any conclusions about Israel’s receptivity toward new U.S. peace efforts.
The four Palestinians, all residents of the Gaza Strip, have been described by the Israel Defense Force as hard-core terrorists involved in Al Fatah, the military faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization controlled by Yasir Arafat.
“Deportations are a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention as it pertains to the treatment of inhabitants of the occupied territories,” Tutwiler said. “The United States believes that charges of wrongdoing should be brought in a court of law, based on evidence to be argued in a public trial.”
The United Nations also urged Israel on Monday to reconsider its deportation decision Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar “hopes that all sides will refrain from acts that can serve only to heighten tension in the area” and undermine confidence, said a statement issued by his spokesman.
The United States protested the decision in a conversation between John Kelly, assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs, and Zalman Shoval, the Israeli ambassador. In addition, William Brown, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, spoke with Israeli Foreign Ministry officials.
REPORT ON SETTLEMENTS ISSUED
But deportations are by no means the only grip the United States has with Israeli policy in the administered territories. It also considers Israeli settlement growth beyond its pre-1967 borders as “an obstacle to peace.”
Last week, the State Department issued a report saying there had been a 10 percent increase in each of the last few years in the number of Jews settling in East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights and the West Bank.
The report was mandated in last year’s foreign aid bill by Rep. David Obey (D-Wis.), chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee on foreign operations.
But it is expected to be “kept on the shelf” until Israel makes a formal request to the Bush administration and Congress for more U.S.-guaranteed loans for Soviet Jewish housing, which it has agreed not to request until September at the earliest.
In the interim, one of the report’s eyecatching figures is that in 1990, 5,830 newly arrived Soviet Jewish emigres elected to reside in East Jerusalem, compared with 3,000 others who chose to live in the West Bank or Golan Heights.
The United States does not recognize Israeli sovereignty over East Jerusalem, which Israel annexed shortly after its capture from Jordan in the Six-Day War of 1967.
The report also says that “while the immigrants going to the territories other than East Jerusalem constitute only 1.2 percent of the 1990 immigration flow from the Soviet Union, they represent approximately 20 percent of the 1990 growth in settlement population there.”
The report estimates the Jewish settlement population at 90,000 on 150 settlements in the West Bank, 12,000 in 30 settlements in the Golan Heights and 3,000 in 15 settlements in the Gaza Strip.
It says that 120,000 Jews live in 12 “settlements” or “neighborhoods” in East Jerusalem and its expanded municipal boundaries.
The report observes that while “the increase in the number of new settlements has fallen off substantially since 1984,” the “expansion of the Israeli presence in the occupied territories continues to grow at a faster rate than the number of new settlements would otherwise indicate.”
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