Mideast road map hits impasse

Other analysts say the White House failure to press Israel harder represents a lost opportunity. "After all the lengthy [US] administration efforts, such a poor result for a week of meeting the leaders ... only thickens the smell of expected failure [of the road map]," writes Ha'aretz columnist Gideon Samet.

The current cease-fire is fragile, these critics say, and needs more tending than the US is giving it. They point to two crucial requirements, trust building and easing conditions for Palestinians.

"If the cease-fire isn't going to bring about an end to current Israeli collective punishment and settlement expansion, then we will have growing anger and frustration and this will lead to another explosion," says Palestinian legislator Ghassan Khatib. "If the US is happy about the achievement of this cease-fire, but doesn't do enough to build on it, then there will be trouble."

Mr. Khatib says Palestinians have met a longstanding Israeli demand of stopping violence with the cease-fire, yet Palestinian movement is still largely restricted and construction on the separation barrier continues, as do home demolitions, land seizures, the expansion of settlements, and the creation of outposts - sites used to expand an existing settlement or create a new one.

In Washington, Sharon pledged to remove 12 "illegal" outposts from Palestinian land and told Bush he had removed 22 others.

Dror Etkes, settlement watch director for the Israeli group Peace Now, says 22 outposts have been evacuated in the past year, but others have been built. That dynamic has continued so that since the road map was launched on June 4, outpost numbers haven't changed at all, says Mr. Etkes.

"Serious infrastructure works are going on in some outposts so that altogether, we are in a worse place than we were before [June 4]," says Etkes. "We have the same amount of outposts but now they have more houses, electricity, roads, more of everything that makes an outpost."

"The removal of settlement outposts is stalling at best, and at worst it borders on fraud," writes Mr. Barnea of Yediot Ahronoth.

For Palestinians like Bethlehem landowner Qaissieh, settlement expansion is a constant worry. He was given a reprieve when the Israeli army intervened Wednesday, ordering the settlers working on his land to stop.

"The road was constructed illegally without the proper permits, therefore legal measures have been taken," says Talia Somech, spokeswoman for the army's civil administration in the West Bank. "If it's Palestinian private land, obviously you can't build on it."

At Efrat, the settlement which began the construction on Qaissieh's land, a representative describes the work, some 2 1/2 miles from their community and in the middle of an uninhabited valley, as "the making of a security path."

At the YESHA Council, the body that represents settlers, spokesman Yoshua Moryossef says the group doesn't comment on these matters or on the political push to dismantle outposts.

"We prefer to answer on the ground, not in words," he says.

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