'IDF has not received orders to evacuate outposts'

Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi said Tuesday that the IDF has not received orders to prepare for the evacuation of outposts in the West Bank.

"At this point we have not received concrete directives to evacuate any particular outpost, excluding illegal ones," Ashkenazi said.

Ashkenazi added that "wherever possible" police officers will be responsible for evacuating civilians from outposts.

On Monday, some 200 people, mostly children, arrived near the West Bank town of Tul Karm to establish a new illegal outpost. The Israel Defense Forces did not stop them or interfere.

The outpost, Tzur Ya, is one of 11 set up Monday and the day before by the militant Youth for Israel movement.

The movement was formed after the disengagement from Gaza in 2005, due to the youngsters' disappointment in what they viewed as an overly compromising stance taken by the settlers' leadership. The movement's members will inhabit and maintain the new outposts in the territories.

Some 40 teenage girls spent a three-day outing in the illegal West Bank outpost of Ramat Migron last week, as "spiritual preparation" for the "relentless battle on the right to settle the Land of Israel," according to the organizers.

"We've had girls here from Tel Aviv and Haifa, aged 13-18," says Shlomit Amitai, 16, a resident of Ramat Migron and a member of Youth for Israel, which hosted the girls.

"They built the place they slept in themselves and cultivated the land in preparation for living in an outpost. I'm sure every girl who stayed here will come to spend the Sabbath, and then after a few Sabbaths they'll join a group and set up their own outpost," she says.

Ramat Migron was set up so that if the settlers' leadership council agrees to evacuate the nearby illegal Migron outpost, Jewish settlers would remain on the mountain.

Several single youngsters and one couple inhabit the Ramat Migron outpost, which consists of a girls hut, a boys hut and a kitchen in between. The huts, which have been dismantled more than once by security forces, have no electric power or running water.

At the end of their sojourn at Ramat Migron, the girls were hoping to meet Daniella Weiss, the spiritual leader of the West Bank's new outposts. Weiss bailed at the last minute, but the girls, feasting on cake and sweet drinks on the floor, summed up their stay with satisfaction and promised to spend the Sabbath there soon. Some are thinking of joining a group planning to set up another outpost.

"I don't know if I personally would live in an outpost, but it contributes to the entire people of Israel that the land is being settled," says a 16-year-old girl from Tel Aviv. "For me it was fun to be in the open space."

In their final group discussion the girls heard a proverb from The Zohar - a book widely seen as the most important work on Jewish mysticism - likening the Land of Israel to a mother, who weeps when her children leave her and go into exile.

"What we do is like bandaging a mother's wounds," Amitai says, explaining the proverb's meaning. "This empty earth is a wound that must be bandaged with a settlement."