Trench war escalates on West Bank

Palestinians advanced behind a bulldozer yesterday in an attempt to cross the trenches dug on Ariel Sharon's orders around their premier academic institution, the Bir Zeit University outside Ramallah.

One man was killed and 40 injured when the Israeli forces fired teargas and sporadic live rounds as they marched on the two deep trenches sealing off Ramallah from the university and villages where 65,000 people live.

The protesters flung handfuls of earth into the trenches in a vain attempt to lift the siege of the West Bank city, imposed as one of Mr Sharon's first acts as prime minister.

Dozens of stranded villagers and students tried to make their way home along the roadside.

They included Hiam Ferris, who was released from hospital yesterday morning with her day-old daughter Nadine bundled in a blanket.

"God only knows how I am going to get home," she said, after a taxi dropped her at the edge of the trench and left her to walk to her village, Deyr Jareer, on the far side.

The army strengthened the siege by heaping earth on the last of the unpaved roads still accessible to motorists.

The Ramallah siege is the first concrete manifestation of Mr Sharon's strategy for dealing with the Palestinian uprising, which began five months ago.

It prompted Arab foreign ministers meeting in Cairo yesterday to urge the UN security council to call an emergency session to discuss Israel's "escalating aggression" against the Palestinians. They also asked the council to approve the immediate deployment of an international force to provide protection for the Palestinian people in the West Bank and Gaza.

Although the US is likely to block a security council condemnation of Israel, the Arab leaders wanted to send a clear message to Mr Sharon that they would stand firm against him using further on the Palestinians and turning the West Bank and Gaza into apartheid-like cantons.

According to Israeli newspapers, the government is about to unveil a "divide and conquer" plan in which the army will carve the West Bank into 60 isolated cantons, cut off from the outside world by ditches and barricades.

Palestinians say the strategy is turning the West Bank into a prison and their cities into isolated cell blocks.

"They have transformed the country into a cluster of prisons," said Mustafa Barghouti, director of the Palestinian medical relief committee.

Under the Oslo peace agreements, Israel controls all the roads to the West Bank cities, enabling it to impose the blockade which has crippled the Palestinian economy.

It has reinforced the Palestinians' sense that, six years after they achieved limited self-rule, they remain under military occupation.

Yesterday's demonstration was the first mass civilian protest for weeks.

"Even people like me who are not involved politically are going to be involved soon," said a doctor in Bethlehem.

"You are checked every 100 metres, and humiliated at every checkpoint. It is an insult to any human being."