Halving the West Bank Their Way

From The Globe and Mail:

One day after Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert called on his people to prepare to make painful concessions ahead of a U.S.-hosted peace process, an Israeli newspaper revealed that his government has ordered the expropriation of Palestinian land to build a highway.

Israeli and Palestinian analysts believe the move is meant to give the Jewish state control over a large chunk of Palestinian territory from Jerusalem east to the Jordan Valley.

The Israeli army issued the order to expropriate 1,100 dunams of land from four Arab villages, the Israeli broadsheet Haaretz reported yesterday. (A dunam is 1,000 square metres.)