Israel's 'security fence' won't be completed?
The Washington Post reports that it's unlikely that Israel's '
security fence' in Judea and Samaria will ever be completed due to cost overruns, Supreme Court rulings and a decline in terrorism.
The last substantial work on the barrier, a network of fences and concrete walls flanked by a military patrol road, was finished in 2007. The construction underway now largely involves moving parts of it off Palestinian land in response to a series of Israeli Supreme Court rulings that found that the barrier had in some cases isolated families and sealed off villages from farmland to a degree that security concerns did not warrant.
A portion of the barrier in the sparsely populated southern West Bank remains unfinished, and the Israeli Defense Ministry said in a recent memo that "for budgetary and other considerations" it did not plan to complete the barrier around Maale Adumim, a major Jewish settlement east of Jerusalem.
That will leave as much as 40 percent of the barrier's 420-mile planned route unfinished. Even with the substantial gaps, Israeli military officials and politicians credit the barrier -- one of Israel's more controversial undertakings -- with a decline in suicide and other bombings originating from the West Bank.
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Israel Matzav: Israel's 'security fence' won't be completed?