There is no long-term future for the Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip, and isolated settlements in the West Bank will have to be dismantled as well, Israel's Prime Minister Mr Ariel Sharon is reported to have told fellow politicians in a series of meetings over the last few days.
Mr Sharon is tomorrow expected to deliver a landmark speech in which he will pledge to spend the next six months trying to make a success of the internationally backed "road map" for peace with the Palestinians.
However, if no substantive progress can be made, the Prime Minister will reportedly announce, he will begin to take "unilateral measures." These are expected to include the completion of the controversial West Bank security barrier, a military deployment behind a "new security line", and the dismantling of some isolated West Bank settlements and of all the settlements in the Gaza Strip, where some 7,000 Jews live in heavily guarded enclaves among 1.3 million Palestinians.
"However we look at it," Mr Sharon reportedly said at one meeting, "Jews won't be living in Gaza for long."
Urged by the leader of his main coalition partner, Justice Minister Mr Yosef Lapid of the Shinui faction, to reconsider the route of the West Bank fence, Mr Sharon is said to have flatly dismissed the idea. The Bush administration has intimated that it would support the construction of the barrier if it were routed along the pre-1967 border between Israel and what was then the Jordanian-ruled West Bank. But Mr Sharon has approved a route that, in places, cuts deep into the West Bank, encompassing settlements.
Opposed by the Palestinian Authority as a "land grab", this route has been widely condemned, and the United Nations General Assembly last week voted to seek a declarative ruling on the legality of the barrier from the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
Although the Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mr Ahmed Korei is this week making a renewed effort, with Egyptian mediation, to negotiate a unilateral intifada ceasefire with all Palestinian factions, Mr Sharon has also been telling colleagues he has low expectations of Mr Korei, and believes his government will fall within six months. Efforts to arrange a meeting between the two have been suspended.
Mr Sharon is expected to announce his plans tomorrow at the closing of a major security conference at Herzliya, outside Tel Aviv. At yesterday's opening session, Mr Avi Dichter, the head of the domestic Shin Bet intelligence agency, echoed Mr Sharon's assessment of Mr Korei's performance, and warned that the 10 weeks that had passed without a suicide bombing in Israel constituted "an illusory quiet".
More than 20 suicide bombers had been intercepted in that period, he said, including three in the past 10 days. His own agency had failed to provide security for Israel in the past three years, he acknowledged, urging the government to complete the security barrier as its foremost priority.
Mr Dichter issued an unprecedentedly harsh verbal assault on Iran, branding it the world's "number one terror nation".
The security chief also highlighted the dangers posed by Jewish terrorists, who had killed at least seven Palestinians over the past three years and whose dream of removing the mosques on Jerusalem's Temple Mount, he said, was losing him sleep.
Israel will bar Mr Arafat, confined to his Ramallah headquarters, from visiting Bethlehem at Christmas for the third year in a row, Israeli officials said.