Israel drawing up bilateral pullout plan-report

JERUSALEM, June 13 (Reuters) Israel is drawing up a plan to negotiate a West Bank redeployment with the Palestinians rather than pursue unilateral moves, bowing to international pressure against go-it-alone steps, a newspaper said today.

The Haaretz daily said an alternative draft of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's ''realignment'' plan would offer Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas an independent state with provisional borders in 90 per cent of the West Bank and in Gaza.

Abbas has called for a state in all of the occupied West Bank and in the Gaza Strip, which Israel quit last year.

Olmert has proposed evacuating some 70,000 Israelis from isolated settlements in the West Bank while keeping larger enclaves, a move he has said Israel would make on its own if peacemaking with the Palestinians remained frozen. Haaretz said Olmert, who held talks on his plan with US President George W. Bush last month and is now on a visit to Britain and France to discuss the proposal, had encountered international opposition to unilateral steps.

As a result, the newspaper reported, the Israeli government has started to draft an alternative plan that would turn ''realignment'' into a bilateral move carried out in conjunction with Abbas.

Under the revised proposal, a temporary frontier would largely follow the route of Israel's West Bank barrier, which would leave major Jewish settlement enclaves built on occupied land under Israeli control.

Abbas, who opposes any unilateral pullout, has said he rejects the establishment of a Palestinian state with temporary borders as well as any border demarcation based on Israel's controversial barrier which Palestinians call a land grab.

Haaretz said Israel, in a bid to win acceptance of the West Bank plan, would try to present the revised proposal as a stage of an internationally-sponsored peace ''road map''.

It would skip the first phase of the road map -- requiring the dismantling of militant groups and a freeze on Jewish settlement construction -- and go straight to the second phase offering a provisional Palestinian state, Haaretz said.

It did not say when the alternative plan would be finalised.

REUTERS KD PM1335