While the larger established settlements are effectively big towns of permanent buildings, surrounded by high fences and guarded by the Israeli army at vast expense, the outposts are usually just a few caravans and portable buildings set up on remote hilltops by Jewish extremists. Many believe this is the first step towards legalising the outposts and giving them official status.Yesterday’s move, in direct contravention of the peace plan, has strengthened the impression that Israel is now openly ignoring the road-map, which was personally backed by President Bush.A few weeks ago, Mr Sharon’s government agreed plans for a controversial new “separation fence” to cut deep into the West Bank so the large settlement of Ariel, and a few other established settlements, could be on the “Israeli” side. We will continue building it,” Mr Sharon told a group of European parliamentarians in Jerusalem.At the Aqaba summit in June, Mr Sharon promised to take down illegal outposts built by Jewish extremists in occupied territory since he came to power. But yesterday the Israeli Defence Ministry confirmed it is to provide eight of the outposts with new services including lighting, school buses and tougher security from the Israeli army. The army said one soldier was lightly wounded.The attacks came as Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister, reaffirmed Israel’s determination to press ahead with construction of its vast barrier in the West Bank, in defiance of US and international pressure “The security fence is not a political border The fence is an additional means of preventing terror. The Middle East peace process was marred yesterday by fresh violence on the Lebanese border and an admission from the Israeli government that it will provide new services to illegal settlement outposts it pledged to dismantle under the “road-map” peace plan.

The German government said that it was considering the withdrawal of a four-member team of water-supply experts sent to Iraq in September.Mr Westphal said that several weeks ago, the ICRC had received “unspecified warnings that we may at one stage or another be the targets of an attack”.He said it that was unclear which groups would wish to target the organisation. The Paris-based humanitarian group M?cins Sans Fronti?s said that it would “scale down its current expatriate team of seven in Baghdad”. It said that by hitting the Red Cross, the attackers “aimed their explosives at the symbolic heart of neutral assistance”.The Greek branch of Doctors of the World, which continued working in Baghdad during the US-led assault, said that it would probably pull out at least two of its three members of staff as a result of the suicide bomb attack. “We want to avoid that.” The attack on the ICRC, which has been working in conjunction with the Iraqi Red Crescent on projects that included landmine education and the provision of water and sanitation equipment, highlighted the dangers that even organisations not linked to US forces face in Iraq.

Other aid groups, which have been jittery since the August attack on the Baghdad offices of the UN which killed the special envoy, Sergio Vieira de Mello, are now scaling back their operations. Mr Gassmann said that the organisation would not be seeking further military protection from the US, in order that it could be “distinguished” from the occupying forces. “That is not an option because if you do militarise the Red Cross and the access to the Red Cross, it will be extremely difficult for the people who are seeking our help to get access to the Red Cross,” he said. Since 1980, it has provided assistance during the Iran-Iraq war and the Gulf war in 1991.But officials said that they believed that the organisation, which has 39 expatriates and more than 700 Iraqi staff, had not been struck by accident.”We are quite convinced now that we have been targeted as an institution. Our Iraqi staff is as much targeted and threatened by these kind of attacks as expatriate people,” Pierre Gassmann, head of the ICRC’s Baghdad office, told CNN.”We are now thinking about what we can do in order to protect [ourselves] and see how we can continue working. We have to think about all of the implications that this attack will have and by Saturday this week we’ll have taken decisions.