Nazir Majally • Asharq Al-Awsat

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, 20 January 2004 — Israel, facing a world court hearing over its contentious wall in the West Bank, plans cosmetic changes to its route, sources said yesterday.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said on Sunday that the Jewish state could mull adjustments in order to make life easier for Palestinians, but would do so only on its own terms.

“There will definitely be changes, but they will be cosmetic changes, tactical changes,” one senior source said.

Meanwhile, Sharon warned MPs yesterday that negotiations with Syria would ultimately lead to a withdrawal from the occupied Golan Heights, a parliamentary source said.

“It’s important to know that at the end of negotiations with Syria, Israel would have to leave the Golan Heights,” the source quoted Sharon as saying at a meeting of Parliament’s foreign affairs and defense committee.

MPs interpreted his comments as meaning that Sharon was ruling out an early resumption of peace negotiations that broke off four years ago over the fate of the Golan, Israeli radio reported.

Israel says completed sections of the barrier of razor wire and concrete, rising steadily inside the West Bank, has helped stop at least two dozen suicide attacks like those that have killed hundreds of Israelis over three years of conflict.

But Palestinians decry it as an “Apartheid Wall” meant to deprive them of a viable state by cutting deep into the West Bank around Jewish settlements as well as to seal a permanent Israeli hold on land the Palestinians want for a state.

Palestinians dismiss any talk of changing the route and insist Israel must not build it beyond the “Green Line” marking its boundary with the West Bank before the 1967 Middle East War.

“No peace with this wall,” Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qorei said in English to reporters in the West Bank city of Ramallah. “This is a wall of annexation and expansion. It’s not acceptable.”

The wall, which has made even Israel’s main ally the United States uncomfortable, faces its toughest challenge next month at a hearing of the Hague-based International Court of Justice — also known as the world court. A day after Sharon held a strategy meeting with top ministers and decided to challenge the court’s right to rule whether the barrier should be torn down, Palestinian officials set out their own line of attack.

“We will show maps, provide accurate figures in terms of the number of people affected...show the depth of the destruction of the economy that it has caused,” said one official in Ramallah.

Palestinians see the hearings as a chance to secure a ruling on the occupation itself. They will also argue that Israel has broken the Geneva Conventions by failing to look after the interests of people under its military control.

On Israel’s northern frontier, an anti-tank missile fired from Lebanon hit an Israeli Army bulldozer clearing explosives the Lebanese group Hezbollah had planted inside Israeli territory earlier this month, Israeli security sources said.

In Beirut, Hezbollah said it had destroyed an Israeli tractor that entered Lebanon. An Israeli soldier was killed and another seriously injured.

— Additional input from agencies