Israeli Prime Minister says all Jerusalem to remain Israeli

Netanyahu was speaking at a ceremony Thursday marking 42 years since Israel captured east Jerusalem in the 1967 Mideast war. He did not refer to Palestinian demands to declare east Jerusalem the capital of the state they want to establish.

Netanyahu said, "United Jerusalem is Israel's capital. Jerusalem was always ours and will always be ours. It will never again be partitioned and divided."

Before the 1967 war, Jordan controlled east Jerusalem, while Israel had the western section. Shortly after the war, Israel annexed east Jerusalem. It did not annex other territories, like the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.

MAOZ ESTHER, West Bank (AP) , Israeli security forces demolished a minor Jewish settlement outpost in the West Bank on Thursday, three days after President Barack Obama told Israel's visiting prime minister he must halt settlement activity. But within hours, defiant settlers began rebuilding.

Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said troops and police evicted settlers who had been staying in seven metal huts, and removed the structures. He said there was no violent resistance and no arrests were made.

The move, while symbolic, was unlikely to resolve a simmering dispute between the new Israeli and American governments over Israeli settlement activity in the West Bank.

Israeli peace groups say there are at least 100 wildcat outposts in the West Bank, in addition to 121 settlements authorized by the government. For years, Israel has pledged to remove outposts, but little has been done. Most of the few that have been removed have been quickly rebuilt.

That pattern repeated itself on Thursday.

Some 40 people lived in Maoz Esther, on a hilltop northeast of the Palestinian city of Ramallah.

Twisted metal and household furniture lay in a heap on the ground after the military left. A few teenagers prayed and milled about, while others sifted through the rubble to salvage materials.

Within hours, young settlers were putting the outpost back up.

"Every time they demolish it, it is rebuilt and that is what comforts me," a resident, Emuna Ben-Yona told The Associated Press. She said her mother was shot and killed by Palestinians nearby six years ago.

The U.S. has long criticized all settlements as obstacles to peace, since they are built on captured land that the Palestinians claim for a future state. At their White House meeting Monday, Obama told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that "settlements have to be stopped."

Some 280,000 Israelis now live in West Bank settlements, including several thousand in outposts, many of them little more than a a few mobile homes.

Israeli defense officials said that after returning from Washington on Wednesday, Netanyahu met Defense Minister Ehud Barak and they agreed to take down seven unauthorized outposts in the coming weeks.

Despite Netanyahu's pledges to remove illegal outposts, he believes that authorized settlements should continue to expand to allow for what Israel calls "natural growth" of the population.

That position, along with his refusal in Washington to endorse the goal of establishing an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel, has put him at odds with Obama. The "two-state solution" is the centerpiece of U.S.-led international peace efforts in the region.

In a television interview, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton voiced the toughest criticism to date of settlement construction.

"First, we want to see a stop to settlement construction, additions, natural growth, any kind of settlement activity," she told Al-Jazeera this week.

Israel's hardline foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, rejected such criticism on Thursday. Speaking to business leaders, Lieberman said that before Israel captured the West Bank in 1967, "there wasn't peace then either. It was exactly the same. There was terror and tension and attacks."

Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev acknowledged the differences with the White House.

"We are having an ongoing dialogue with the Americans on this issue," he said. He added, however, that "all sides have obligations in this process," a reference to Palestinian pledges to crack down on militants.

Israeli peace activist Dror Etkes said dismantling Maoz Esther , one of the newest, smallest outposts , was a tiny gesture. "It is far, far away from being something significant in changing the reality in the West Bank," he said.

Etkes said the Israeli government had allowed other larger outposts to remain and grow over the last two years in spite of evacuation orders.

SOURCE: Philly News

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