Jerusalem - The Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Ehud Barak, was last night engaged in his first major confrontation with Jewish settlers in the West Bank, writes David Horovitz.
At a meeting in his office with the leaders of the settlement movement, his aides said, Mr Barak asked them to voluntarily uproot some 15 settlement outposts - set up, illegally, in the last weeks of the previous, pro-settlement government of Mr Benjamin Netanyahu. If they did not evacuate the outposts themselves, Mr Barak was reported to have warned, he would send in the army to do the job.