Israel starts to fence off the West Bank

Israel began work yesterday on a 75-mile fence that will separate off the northern West Bank, despite opposition from Jewish settlers and the hard right, Israel's Arab citizens and the Palestinians of the occupied territories.

Bulldozers levelled land at a junction near Afula in lower Galilee, from where the fence will run southwards. Israel says it is building the fence to thwart attempts by Palestinian suicide bombers to infiltrate Israel and attack its civilians.

It is expected to form a barrier to the west of four big Palestinian West Bank towns – Jenin, Tulkarm, Qalqilya and Nablus, all of which have proved hotbeds of violent resistance to Israeli occupation and the repeated source of suicide bombers.

Israeli officials said the fence is expected to cost about $1m (£700,000) per kilometre and would have electric sensors that will detect any attempt to cut through it. It is part of a buffer zone that will include army and border police patrols and observation posts, running down the West Bank's flank, to a point almost due west of Tel Aviv – the exact route is still unclear.

Israel's Defence Minister, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, who attended a ground-breaking ceremony at the site yesterday, said the fence would eventually stretch for 345km (215 miles) – the length of the 1967 Green Line between Israel and the occupied West Bank. Mr Ben Eliezer has described it as non-political and temporary, although critics argue it will be politically difficult to remove once built. But Mr Ben- Eliezer said: "Every day that passes without a security fence is likely to cost more lives."

The project, reluctantly endorsed by the Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, has been strongly opposed by Israeli right-wingers who fear it could eventually become a de facto border, undermining their claim to retain possession of the West Bank.

Saeb Erekat, a Palestinian cabinet minister, accused Israel of seeking to divide Palestinian territories into small cantons and "start a new apartheid system which is worse than what happened in South Africa".

Palestinian officials say the fence will add to the restriction of movement for Palestinian West Bankers, who are already required to get permits from Israeli authorities to move between the major towns. By contrast, the more than 200,000 Israeli settlers living on the West Bank (excluding east Jerusalem) in contravention of the Fourth Geneva Convention, move freely.

Representatives of Israel's one million Arab citizens are angry about the land confiscation that the erection of the fence will require, citing plans to expropriate hundreds of acres belonging to the Israeli Arab town of Umm al-Fahm.

Israeli security services have pointed to the example of the Gaza Strip, where 1.2 million Palestinians are enclosed by an electro-sensitive fence and a buffer zone. Their officials point out that the Palestinian suicide bombers, who began to infiltrate Israel last year, have come from the West Bank, not from Gaza.

£ Mr Sharon, who held talks in Washington last week with President George Bush, told his cabinet yesterday that now was not the time for talks on any type of Palestinian state, an option being considered by Mr Bush. A statement said: "The Prime Minister said that in his meetings in the United States he had made it clear the following ... regarding the matter of a 'Palestinian state', conditions are not ripe for that discussion."