No action taken on W. Bank outposts

[Englander]

Dec. 7, 2005

Only a handful of remedial steps have been taken over the nine months following the March release of a report by attorney Talia Sasson on the establishment of illegal outposts in the West Bank, Sasson told The Jerusalem Post in an exclusive interview this week.

The report, commissioned by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, investigated the more than 100 illegal outposts and how to prevent more of them from being established.

So far, said Sasson, the army had implemented only one of her several recommendations to change the law to combat the illegal construction.

At the same time, the ministerial committee headed by Justice Minister Tzipi Livni appointed to study Sasson's recommendations on instituting proper governmental procedures for building legally in the territories has disintegrated without coming to any decisions on how to implement the recommendations. According to Sasson, the ministerial committee was due to publish its report in mid-August. It did not do so because the government was busy implementing disengagement. Since then, the Labor Party members of the committee have resigned from the government and no longer belong to the committee.

>snip

Before leaving public service last year, Sasson served as the head of the Special Tasks Division of the State Attorney's Office. One of her jobs was to deal with law enforcement in the territories, including the question of illegal construction. But Sasson said that until she researched the illegal outposts at Sharon's request, "I did not know how grave the situation was or how involved government authorities were in the phenomenon."

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