Land Disputes Imperil Talks by Israel, PLO : Mideast: Palestinian, Israeli opponents of peace plan seize on emotional settlement issue in efforts to undermine accord.

JERUSALEM —  The battle over land in the Israeli-occupied West Bank escalated Wednesday, with Palestinians and soldiers clashing on a disputed hilltop and settlers vowing to stake claims across the territory in coming weeks.

Trapped between the Palestinians and the settlers, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s government is struggling to keep its fragile negotiations with the Palestine Liberation Organization moving forward.

Both sides agree that the settlement issue could wreck the talks if it is not defused soon.

The government’s problem is that both Palestinian and Israeli opponents to the Israeli-PLO peace accord have seized on the settlement issue as a potent weapon in their efforts to undermine it.

PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat’s opponents say settlement expansion shows both Israel’s bad faith and Arafat’s impotence. Jewish settlers say they will use the land issue to show that the Israel-PLO accord cannot work.

“The battle is truly for every inch of the country,” said Yehudit Tayar, a spokeswoman for the Council of Jewish Settlements in Judea and Samaria, an umbrella organization of West Bank Jewish settlements.

Tayar said the council plans to start fencing undeveloped land that lies within the designated boundaries of settlements and to uproot Palestinian trees and crops on those sites in the coming weeks.

After his election in 1992, Rabin froze new settlement construction in the West Bank and said the government would not fund the expansion of existing settlements. He excluded mostly Arab East Jerusalem from that freeze, because Israel has annexed that area and considers it part of Israel.

Palestinians and Israeli peace activists say thousands of new homes for Jews are being built in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem with the government’s approval.

Rabin has allowed government funding of some settlement expansion and allowed private funding for other expansion projects.

The issue began to surface last month, when Palestinians from the village of El Khader, south of Jerusalem, confronted settlers and soldiers over a disputed hilltop. The government eventually froze construction on the site and allowed the settlers of Efrat to build on an alternative hilltop.

The government has also authorized the confiscation of thousands of acres of land for the building of bypass roads meant to help settlers travel from the West Bank to pre-1967 Israel without having to pass through Palestinian towns and villages. Palestinians and Israeli peace activists say that tens of thousands of acres have also been confiscated for quarries and for nature reserves.

Responding to demands from Meretz, the most left-leaning coalition partner in his government, Rabin ordered Housing Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer to report to the Cabinet on Sunday on all land confiscations and building projects in the West Bank.

“The settlers and their friends are the world’s last imperialists, who by the force of the occupation rob the locals of their land and uproot their plants,” said Shulamit Aloni, head of Meretz and minister of culture. “The whole world sees the pictures and hears the voices. We should stop this arrogance, robbery and falsehood.”

At a meeting with Arafat on Tuesday, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres agreed that Israel will inform the Palestinian Authority when it confiscates land for roads.

Palestinian officials say they have appealed to the Clinton Administration to intervene and stop Israel from expanding existing settlements or confiscating more West Bank land. Arafat is under increasing pressure from within his Cabinet to suspend talks with Israel if settlement construction continues.

“I think that this is the end of the road; either all these activities should stop and the settlers withdraw from the occupied and confiscated land or the Palestinian Authority will have to take serious and decisive decisions,” said Yasser Abed Rabbo, minister of culture in the Palestinian Authority.

Palestinians caution that Israel should not underestimate the emotional resonance of the issue.

“The Palestinians are furious about this issue,” said Ghassan Khatib, a former Palestinian peace negotiator. “I have been surprised by how far the villagers are willing to go with this.”