JERUSALEM — The Israeli police and border officers swiftly evicted a group of Jewish settlers from a contested house in the volatile West Bank city of Hebron on Wednesday on the orders of the minister of defense, officials said. At the same time, however, the Israeli government signaled strong support for more Jewish settlement in areas captured in the 1967 war.
Among the signs of official support: the Ministry of Housing, on its Web site, invited bids for plots for the construction of more than 800 apartments in Har Homa, a Jewish development across the 1967 lines in southeast Jerusalem, and in Givat Zeev, a settlement north of Jerusalem in the West Bank.
“The principle that has guided me is to strengthen Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Wednesday, using the biblical names for the West Bank. “But there is one principle that we uphold,” he added, in a warning to unruly settlers. “We do everything according to the law.”
The official support complicates any prospect of renewed peace talks as Israeli and Palestinian leaders prepare for a rare high-level meeting this month.
Israeli and Palestinian officials said on Wednesday that Mr. Netanyahu would receive a delegation led by the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, Salam Fayyad, after Passover, which ends here on April 13. But all indications are that the sides remain far apart.
The Palestinians plan to hand a letter to Mr. Netanyahu outlining their conditions for a return to negotiations, including demands for Israel’s acceptance of the 1967 lines as the basis for a territorial agreement and for a cessation of all settlement activity in the West Bank and East Jerusalem — conditions long rejected by the government.
The long-awaited letter “explains to Netanyahu the basis on which the peace process was built, and Israel’s lack of commitment in terms of settlements,” Nimr Hammad, an adviser to the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, told the Voice of Palestine radio on Wednesday. “We want to know what Netanyahu’s position is, clearly and preferably in writing,” Mr. Hammad said. Mr. Abbas has said that the letter also blames the Israelis for turning the Palestinian Authority into a “nonauthority” with no real control.
An Israeli government official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that Israel would send a letter to the Palestinians in response. He said that it would clarify Israel’s positions, including its call for negotiations without preconditions, as well as basic requirements for an agreement, including Palestinian recognition of Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people — a principle that has been consistently rejected by the Palestinian leadership.
In move that appeared aimed to mollify the settlers, but one that is likely to infuriate Palestinians, Mr. Netanyahu said shortly before the Hebron eviction that he had asked the attorney general to “find a solution” for a neighborhood of the Beit El settlement that was built without proper permits and that a court has ordered to be demolished by May 1.
He said he also intended, together with the defense minister, to seek the necessary permits to retroactively legalize three other West Bank settler outposts that went up without authorization.
The Hebron eviction occurred a day after the expiration of a deadline handed down by the military authorities for voluntary evacuation. Mr. Netanyahu had asked the defense minister to delay a forced eviction, saying that the settlers should be given time to make their legal case for ownership of the property.
The eviction was carried out after Israel’s attorney general declared it was necessary to uphold the rule of law, Israel’s Army Radio reported.
The settlers said they had bought the property legally from its former owner, a Palestinian, but they entered the house last week without seeking the required approval from the military authorities. The military deemed their presence illegal and a risk to public order. Palestinian officials said that the purchase documents had been forged.
In a rare note of discord within Mr. Netanyahu’s governing coalition, rightist ministers blamed the defense minister, Ehud Barak, for ordering the eviction, accusing him of trying to set the government’s agenda. Mr. Barak leads a small centrist faction in a government that is otherwise dominated by right-wing and religious parties.
After the eviction, Mr. Barak said that the process of reviewing the legality of the purchase would continue but that he would “not allow a situation in which unlawful actions are taken to determine or dictate ad hoc facts to the authorities.”
Hebron is a hotly contested city where several hundred Jewish settlers live among almost 200,000 Palestinians. The house in question is near the Cave of the Patriarchs, where the biblical forefathers and their wives, the matriarchs, are said to be buried. The holy site is revered by Jews and Muslims.
For many, Hebron represents one of the cruxes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israeli settlers and their supporters consider the area, which Israel conquered in 1967, part of their biblical birthright. The Palestinians claim the territory as part of a future independent state.
The 15 settlers inside the house at the time of the eviction were mostly women and children, said Micky Rosenfeld, a police spokesman. The police met with no resistance, and the operation was over in 20 minutes, he said. The settlers may have been lulled by earlier reports in the news media that no eviction was likely before the end of the month.
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