Israeli outpost removals seen likely

Israel will likely begin a crackdown on Jewish settler outposts in the occupied West Bank when U.S. President George W. Bush visits the region next week, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's top deputy said on Friday.

Israel's failure to remove scores of West Bank outposts as required by a U.S.-sponsored "road map", which includes statehood for the Palestinians, has posed a challenge to Bush's efforts to revive peace talks before he leaves office next year.

"I hope and assess that in the coming period and thereafter, during the U.S. president's visit to Israel and afterwards, real steps will be taken to remove those outposts," Vice Premier Haim Ramon told Israel Radio.

Bush, due to make his first presidential visit to Israel and Palestinian areas during a Middle East tour between January 8 and 16, told Reuters in an interview on Thursday he would press the Jewish state over the settlement issue.

"I will talk about Israeli settlement expansion, about how that is, that can be, you know, an impediment to success," he said. "The unauthorised outposts for example need to be dismantled, like the Israelis said they would do."

The outposts, erected without Israeli state approval, vary in size and make-up. Some are lone, uninhabited shacks, others bustling clusters of caravans with utilities like access roads. Israel has removed a few but sometimes settlers rebuilt them.

Ramon did not give details on which outposts might be dismantled. But he said a crackdown would focus on those outside Israel's West Bank barrier.

"Certainly those illegal outposts located east of the fence" would be on the removal roster, Ramon said.

Israel calls the barrier, a vast network of fences and concrete barricades, a bulwark against suicide bombers but Palestinians suspect it is designed to demarcate a future border that would annex big settlement blocs.

The World Court has branded as illegal Jewish settlements built by Israel in the West Bank and other territory captured in a 1967 war. Israel disputes this, and Olmert has vowed to keep West Bank settlement blocs under any future peace accord.

The Palestinians, who have yet to meet their own road map obligation to rein in militant factions that have spearheaded fighting against the Jewish state since 2000, insist the Israelis must commit to a more sweeping removal of settlements.

"We say that all settlement, in all its forms, is an illegal and illegitimate act and it is a form of aggression that should be terminated along with the termination of occupation," chief Palestinian peace negotiator Ahmed Qurie said on Thursday.

Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas formally relaunched negotiations at a November conference convened by Bush. But the talks bogged down when Israel's Housing Ministry announced plans to build homes on occupied land near Jerusalem.

Last week, Olmert ordered that any new settlement projects be subject to his approval, a de-facto construction freeze.