MIDDLE EAST: Mordechai Vanunu, the former technician at Israel's Dimona reactor who gave details of Israel's nuclear programme to London's Sunday Times newspaper, will be barred from leaving Israel for at least a year when he is released from prison tomorrow.
Mr Vanunu, who has completed an 18-year jail term, will not be granted a passport, will be confined to a single city, will be prevented from nearing air, land and sea ports and foreign embassies, and will be allowed no contact with foreign nationals, under the sweeping restrictions approved by the Interior Ministry.
"A whole new battle starts on Wednesday, to stop him being a prisoner in his own country," said Peter Hounam, the Sunday Times journalist who handled Mr Vanunu's information for the newspaper in 1986, speaking outside Ashkelon jail where the technician is being held.
Mr Vanunu's adoptive parents, Nick and Mary Eoloff, visited him yesterday, and said he was extremely depressed to learn of the planned limitations, which his lawyer said would be appealed.
Mr Eoloff said that when they had seen him last, in November, "he was high, laughing, very enthusiastic about the end [of his jail term]. Now he's very down."
Mr Vanunu enjoys a considerable amount of sympathy overseas - dozens of supporters are planning to celebrate his release outside the jail - but is widely condemned in Israel as a traitor and spy.
In comments likely to deepen that domestic antipathy, Mr Vanunu told investigators from the Shin Bet domestic security service recently that he did not believe there was any need for a state of Israel, and that he wished his own family, immigrants from Morocco, had stayed in their native land.
A censored and edited audio recording, including those remarks, was released for broadcast yesterday.
Also in the tape, Mr Vanunu rejects the notion that he is a traitor. "This is not treason. It is informing the world," he says. He goes on to deride the "big-shot psychologists" who failed to recognise that they were offering access to highly sensitive information at the reactor, in Israel's southern Negev, "to the wrong man".
He says he wishes the reactor was destroyed, precisely as Israel destroyed Saddam Hussein's nuclear reactor at Osiraq in 1981.
Meanwhile yesterday, Israel's Foreign Minister, Mr Silvan Shalom, said he was now backing Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan for a pullout from the Gaza Strip having earlier said he opposed the move. Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who announced his support on Sunday, said yesterday that he would invest tens of millions of dollars in West Bank settlements.
Following US President George Bush's apparent endorsement of permanent Israeli control over parts of the West Bank, Israeli leaders are talking with greater public confidence about long-term plans for expanding major West Bank settlements, even as they gear up to dismantle the 21 settlements in Gaza.
Palestinian Authority President Mr Yasser Arafat yesterday condemned the planned Israeli withdrawal from Gaza as a trick, since Israel intends to maintain control over border crossings and air space.
"What is proposed," said Mr Arafat in a statement, "is transforming Gaza Strip into a big prison."