Israel bars hundreds from evacuated W Bank outpost

JERUSALEM, July 23 (Reuters) Israeli police arrested a dozen Jewish settlers today and evicted hundreds of others carrying bricks they intended to use to start rebuilding an outpost Israel had evacuated in the occupied West Bank.

The protest, illustrating the opposition Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert faces over any withdrawals from occupied land, came as Tony Blair arrived on his first mission as envoy of the Quartet of West Asia peace brokers.

Television footage showed police dragging protesters from the site of Homesh, a settlement demolished in 2005 that has since become a rallying point for those who oppose further such concessions to Palestinian demands.

Homesh was one of four West Bank settlements evacuated at the same time as all 21 settlements were closed in the Gaza Strip. Some quarter of a million Jews still live in scores of settlements among 2.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank.

Hundreds of young settler men and women had forced their way past a number of Israeli roadblocks to reach Homesh. Police arrested a dozen people and another 300 were evicted from the site, police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said.

Menorah Hazani, a settler spokeswoman who said she attended the protest with her 10-month-old son, said demonstrators had hiked there carrying bricks in their bags, which some of them used to lay a cornerstone for a synagogue.

She said the protesters had numbered close to 1,000 but that most fled to the nearby hills after police arrived.

''This was not just a demonstration but an attempt to rebuild Homesh,'' said Hazani, reached by telephone just after police evicted her from the site.

Hazani said the settlers, for whom Homesh has become a symbol of protest against the evacuation of some 10,000 settlers from the Gaza Strip, would continue to try to reach the site to relaunch their settlement.

''We want to rectify the wrongdoing of that withdrawal,'' she said.

Olmert has opposed the campaign to resettle Homesh, and said on Friday Israel would have to withdraw from ''many areas'' in the West Bank in exchange for peace.

But Olmert has so far failed to meet a commitment -- under a US-backed ''road map'' for peace -- to remove dozens of unauthorised outposts built in the West Bank by settlers who see the land as promised to the Jews by God.

Reuters JK GC1851