The court ruled that what the state was considering at the time to determine the fence's route around Tzofit was not security but political factors.

The separation fence borders the east side of Tzofit, which is located near the Palestinian city of Qalqilyah, and cut into lands belonging to the Palestinian villages of Jayous and Azoun, according to the report.

The fence encompasses a planned industrial zone which had not been legally approved at the time of the petition, the report added.

In 2002, the petition was first filed against the routing of the fence around Tzofit and the state gave a security-related rationale for running the fence in this area, which prompted the high court then to reject the petition.

However, the state admitted about a year ago that the considerations that determined the fence route in the area were not strictly security related.

The High Court of Justice was due on Thursday to hear seven other petitions protesting the route of the separation barrier in Gush Etzion, a Jewish settlement between the West Bank cities of Hebron and Bethlehem.

Israel began to construct the separation fence in 2002 as a means to stop suicide bombing attacks, which the Palestinians view as a land grab.

Israeli former Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz said in April that total length of the separation fence will reach 870 km and some 335 km are currently operational.

The Israeli/Palestinian conflict is one of the most pressing issues in international politics. The loss of Palestinian life, however, is not a pressing issue, nor does it seem to be a concern of the US media. The killing of the family last week was a rare instance in which the US media decided a Palestinian tragedy was news. Maybe the outlets realized that blowing up a family picnicking on a beach can cause quite a media firestorm and they didn't want to miss out on the coverage. Granted, the articles had the usual section addressing how "brutal" the Palestinian "terrorist" groups are, while describing the reign of rocket fire "bombarding" Israel (which have killed a couple of civilians in the last nine months). It would be interesting if CNN, in reporting an attack on Israel, also reported on Israel's illegal confiscation of Palestinian land, their policy of slow ethnic cleansing, non-recognition of the Palestinian people, and ruthless military and settler occupation that disregards the Geneva Conventions and international law. I know that CNN doesn't claim to be "fair and balanced" but maybe the "most trusted name in news" should give it a try.

Where is the world community's condemnation of Israel's military actions? Where are the words of reprobation from the European Union-the champion of democracy? I know the death of Palestinians is not as interesting as the World Cup-but this is getting a bit ridiculous. The West has sided against the Palestinian people-hoping the move will cause the collapse of the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority. Should the death of innocent Palestinians be considered the necessary collateral damage for the fall of Hamas? If so, how many Palestinians will suffice? In the last five years, Israeli forces killed four women and children a week on average, with barely a peep coming from the international community. If an increase in internal strife is necessary for this collapse, who is to lead the Palestinian people after the fall? How can one expect Palestinian Authority President Abu Mazen to come to the aid of Palestinians? While Abu Mazen slammed the actions of Israel today as "state terrorism," it is he who benefits from the discord in Palestinian society.

The international community and Israel elected Abu Mazen as the new negotiator for peace. Yet, this only occurred after the world powers and Israel refused to consider him a partner during the 14 months following the passing of Yasser Arafat. No matter how many hoops Abu Mazen jumped through it was never enough, and his charades to appease the West and Israel were a contributing factor in the collapse of Fatah, his ruling party. Suppose Abu Mazen gained power with a newly emplaced Fatah-led government, would peace be around the corner? With the construction of Oslo, it is Abu Mazen who helped create the trenches Palestinians stand in today. It is the Oslo period which led to the biggest expansion of settlements in Israeli history. Why should Palestinian society bring back Fatah's financial corruption, disingenuous promises of prosperity, and inept policy that miserably failed for fifteen years?

Abu Mazen should begin to realize that he was elected to lead the Palestinian people to a better future. He was not elected to align his political agenda with Western interests. The international community's firm stand against Palestinian society and democracy is a position that will fail. Hamas is not going anywhere and neither is the will of the Palestinian people. Political ploys and maneuvering by Israel and the West will fall short. This lesson should have been learned after Hamas' sweeping victory in the parliamentary elections. The Palestinians are at their strongest when they unify-this is a fact Abu Mazen must come to grips with. It is also what Israel and America fear the most.

Fatah gunmen set fire to the West Bank office of Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, a senior Hamas leader, on Monday after a day of running clashes. More clashes were expected despite a call from Abbas for calm. Fighting in Gaza has killed 20 people in the past month.

"In this increasingly bloody power struggle, both camps are mobilising armed militias, stockpiling weapons, resorting to killings and spreading bedlam," the report said.

Abbas's referendum on a manifesto penned by Palestinian prisoners in an Israeli jail is at the heart of the tension. Hamas, which is sworn to destroy Israel, has labelled the referendum a mechanism to topple it.

The proposal calls for a Palestinian state in the entire West Bank and in Gaza, thus implicitly recognising Israel. Hamas refuses to recognise the Jewish state.

"We are slowly, slowly heading towards civil war," said Mohammad Dahlan, an Abbas ally, in the Palestinian parliament.

Although the International Crisis Group's report said Hamas needed to heed international demands and change its stance on Israel, it also said the Palestinians were facing one of the most hostile external environments in their history. The US, the European Union and Israel have cut aid to the government.

Seeing their chance, the onlookers storm the bus and fuelled by a mixture of passions -- fury, indignation and fear of further attack -- they beat the gunman to death.

As the news breaks, Israeli TV prefers to continue its coverage of a local football match rather report the killings. Later, when the channels do cover the deaths, they start by showing the picture of the gunman with the caption "God bless his soul" -- in the same manner as they would normally relate to the victim of a terror attack.

Despite the Prime Minister denouncing the gunman as a terrorist to the world, domestically the media and police concentrate instead on the "lynch mob" who killed the gunman. The police launch a secretive investigation which after 10 months leads to the arrests of seven men on charges of murdering him, and the promise of more arrests to come. A police spokesman describes the men's act against the gunman as one of "cold-blooded murder".

Fanciful? Ridiculous? Well, exactly these events have unfolded in Israel over the past year -- except that the location was not the Jewish city of Nentanya but the Arab town of Shafa'amr in the Galilee; the gunman was not a Palestinian but an Israeli soldier using his army-issue M-16; and the victims were not Israeli Jews but Israeli Arabs.

See how it now starts to make sense.

The killing of four Palestian citzens of Israel by the 19-year-old soldier Eden Natan Zada on 4 August last year, shortly before the disengagement from Gaza, has been quietly forgotten by the world. After the Arab victims were buried, the only question that concerned Israelis was who killed Zada. Yesterday they appeared to get their answer: seven men from Shafa'amr were rounded up by Israeli police to stand trial for his "cold-blooded" murder.

No one was interested in the official neglect of the families of Shafa'amr's dead, all of whom were denied the large compensation payments given to Israeli victims of Palestinian terror. A ministerial committee ruled that, because Zada was a serving soldier, his attack could not be considered a terrorist incident. Apparently only Arabs can be terrorists. To this day the state has not given the families a penny of the compensation automatically awarded to Jewish families.

There was no investigation of why Zada, well-known for his extremist views, had been allowed to go AWOL for weeks from his unit without attempts to trace him. Or how his family's repeated warnings that he had threatened to do something "terrible" to stop the disengagement had been ignored by the authorities. No one questioned why, a few days before his attack, the police had sent Zada away after he tried to hand in his gun.

Even more disturbingly, no one discussed why Zada, who openly belonged to a racist and outlawed movement, Kach, which demands the expulsion, if not eradication, of Arabs from the Holy Land, had been allowed to serve in the army. How had he and thousands of other Kach supporters been left in peace to promote their obscene ideas? Why were these Kach activists, mostly young Israelis, demonstrating openly against the Gaza disengagement, assaulting policemen and soldiers, when the group was supposedly underground?

And why did the authorities not round up and question Zada's Kach friends in his West Bank settlement of Tapuah after the attack? Why was their possible involvement in its planning never considered, nor their role in inciting him to his deed?

The point was that the Israeli authorities wanted Zada to be dismissed as a lone, crazy gunman -- like Baruch Goldstein before him, the army doctor who in 1994 opened fire in the Palestinian city of Hebron, killing 29 Muslim worshippers at the Tomb of the Patriarchs and wounding 125 others.

Although Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister then, denounced Goldstein as an "errant weed", a shrine and park was built for him nearby, in the settlement of Kiryat Arba, venerating him as a "saint" and "a righteous and holy man". Far from being isolated, his shrine regularly attracts thousands of Israeli Jews who congregate deep in Palestinian territority to honour him.

Instead of seeking out and eradicating this growing strain of Jewish fundamentalism in the wake of the Shafa'amr terror attack, Israel claimed that finding and punishing the men who killed Zada was the priority. It was a matter of law and order, said Dan Ronen, the police force's northern commander. He told the Hebrew media: "In a country with law and order, despite the sensitivity, people can't do whatever they see fit. I hope the Arab sector will display maturity and responsibility."

This sounds like an outrageous double standard to the citizens of Shafa'amr, and to the country's more than one million Palestinian citizens. Enforcing the law has never been a major consideration when the offenders are Jewish and the victims are Arabs, even when the killings occur inside Israel.

Arab citizens have not forgotten the massacre of 49 men, women and children by a unit of soldiers who enforced a last-minute curfew on the Israeli village of Kfar Qassem in 1956, executing the villagers -- Arabs, of course -- at the checkpoint one by one as they innocently returned home from a day's work in the fields.

During their trial, the Haaretz newspaper reported that the soldiers received a 50 per cent pay increase and that it was obvious the men were "not treated as criminals but as heroes". Found guilty of an "administrative error", the commander was given a one penny fine.

Nor was anyone held to account when six unarmed Arab citizens were shot dead by the security services in the Galilean town of Sakhnin in 1976 as they protested against another wave of land confiscations that deprived rural Arab communities of their farm land. The prime minister of the day, Rabin again, refused even to launch an investigation.

Some 25 years later, an inquiry was held into the killing by the police of 13 unarmed Arabs in the Galilee in October 2000 as they protested the deaths of Palestinians at the Noble Sanctuary in Jerusalem -- the trigger for the intifada. Six years on, however, not a single policeman has been charged over the deaths inside Israel. Even the commanders who illegally authorised the use of an anti-terror sniper unit against demonstrators armed only with stones have not been punished.

Israel's Arab citizens are also more than familiar with the story of the "Bus 300 affair" of 1984, when two Palestinian gunmen from the occupied territories were captured after hijacking a bus inside Israel. Led away in handcuffs by the Shin Bet security service, the two men were later reported dead.

No one was ever charged over the killings, even though it was widely known at the time who had killed the men and later one senior Shin Bet operative, Ehud Yatom, admitted breaking the men's skulls with a rock. In 1986, to forestall the threat of any indictments, the president of the day, Chaim Herzog, gave all the Shin Bet agents involved an amnesty from prosecution.

If it is shown in court that Zada was in fact beaten to death after the crowd knew he had been restrained, then this history -- of the state's repeated denial of justice to the Arab victims of its violence -- must be taken into account. No one can reasonably have expected the onlookers to stay calm knowing that Zada, like other Jewish emissaries of the state before him, would receive either no punishment or a few years of jail and a pardon because he killed Arabs rather than Jews.

Israel has shown time and again that it selectively enforces law and order, depending on the ethnicity of killer and victim.

Commander Ronen observed at a press conference after the Shafa'amr arrests: "Since October 2000 we have come a long way in our relations with the Arab sector." If that is true, which is doubtful, the authorites have again made every effort to tear apart what little is left of that trust.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He is the author of the forthcoming "Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State" published by Pluto Press, and available in the United States from the University of Michigan Press. His website is www.jkcook.net

Hamas's military wing responded by launching a barrage of makeshift rockets at the Jewish state from the Gaza Strip, but the group says it is willing to call for calm.

"I spoke today with the Prime Minister and he said we definitely want quiet everywhere," Palestinian Government spokesman Ghazi Hamad said.

"We are interested in a cease-fire everywhere."

His remarks follow a drop in militant rocket fire from Gaza.

Earlier this week, a senior member of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's party threatened Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas with assassination if the group renewed suicide bombings in Israel.

Weapons concerns

Hamas has also warned that international efforts to bolster rival security forces loyal to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas would worsen an already violent power struggle.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has approved the first shipment of weapons to Mr Abbas, saying he wants to help the moderate leader against the Hamas-led Government.

Major Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth has reported Israel has transferred 950 M16 rifles from Jordan to Mr Abbas's forces.

The Palestinian Government is demanding an explanation from the President.

An aide to Mr Abbas denies any weapons have been shipped.

Western powers want to ensure Mr Abbas emerges victorious in any power struggle with Hamas.

Palestinian officials and western diplomats have said Jordan and Egypt would provide weapons, ammunition and training for Mr Abbas's presidential guard.

Around 20 people have been killed in clashes between Hamas and Abbas loyalists in Gaza in the past month.

"It is a war without mercy that we must wage against the hatred of Jews," he told a 300-strong assembly including members of the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (CRIF) and France's chief rabbi Joseph Sitruk.

The Israeli prime minister also paid tribute to the memory of a young Jewish man, who was kidnapped, tortured and murdered by a gang from the Paris suburbs this year in a suspected anti-Semitic crime that shocked the country.

French-Israeli relations have often been strained over the question of anti-Semitism - France is home to the world's second largest Jewish community outside Israel, as well as Europe's largest Muslim population, at five million.

In incendiary comments made in 2004, Israel's former prime minister Ariel Sharon urged France's Jews to emigrate immediately to Israel, due to the threats he said they faced at home.

Olmert stopped well short of any similar appeal - but stressed that all Jews, including those living in France, were welcome in Israel.

"You live in a wonderful country, but you have a home - it is the state of Israel - and we hope that one day the world's Jews will come there to live."

He notably called on French parents to allow their children to visit Israel "to get to know the country, to study there and one day to live there."

Olmert also sought to defend his plan to set Israel's borders in the West Bank unilaterally if talks with the Palestinians fail.

"If if is a choice between the 'Greater Israel' and a Jewish state with a Jewish majority, living inside safe and recognised borders, I choose the second option," he said.

If talks fail, Israel "will take its fate into its own hands," he said.