Settlers stage protests against summit

Jewish settlers staged protests on the West Bank yesterday to denounce the Wye River summit.

Jewish settlers staged protests on the West Bank yesterday to denounce the Wye River summit.

Groups of settlers gathered near some 15 major intersections on the West Bank and used their vehicles to block traffic.

Two settlers were detained following a clash with Israeli police outside the settlement of Yzhar, police said.

"We oppose a withdrawal from Judaea and Samaria," the Education Minister, Mr Yitzhak Levy of the National Religious Party, told Israel radio, using the biblical names for the West Bank.

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In another development it emerged yesterday that extremists in a West Bank settlement had tried to expand its boundaries by burying their dead on the outskirts of their land.

Mr Zeev Altmann, a 70-year-old Jewish-American, was buried

several hundred metres outside the boundaries of Kfar Tapoah, a settlement of 95 families near Nablus, a settlement official said.

The Palestinian villagers in nearby Yassuf and Salfit have protested against this "cemetery" on land which they claim as their own and have asked the Israeli government to order the exhumation of the body.

The burial was carried out by a handful of extremists from the settlement who are members of the anti-Arab Kach movement, which was banned in 1994, the settlement official said.

Mr Altmann had visited the colony eight years ago and befriended the extremists, to whom he willed part of his wealth.

Israeli soldiers and police have stopped Mr Altmann's friends holding prayers at his tomb.

A former official in the Kach movement will stand in Jerusalem's November municipal elections, the Maariv daily said yesterday.

The Jerusalem municipal election committee approved the candidacy of Mr Tiran Pollak (31), former right-hand man of the Kach founder, Meir Kahane.

An Israeli court yesterday ordered that three border policemen suspected of shooting at a Palestinian vehicle be remanded for three days while the shooting is investigated.