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Its leadership is in Washington this week negotiating details of a $29m US aid package.The INC said it would start sending clandestine operatives into Iraq with US help. “Now that the administration is much more forthcoming on theseissues, we can take it to another level,” said Sharif Ali Bin al-Hussein, the INC’s official spokesman.. The cluster of spartan white huts has only just sprouted up among the dark hills and vine terraces that separate the Dead Sea from the eastern Mediterranean’s edge; in any other, less troubled landscape, the huts would have little significance. There are only five of them, planted at the end of a newly carved half-mile of muddy track, tucked into a hillside with a commanding view – on a clear winter’s morning – of the plains that lead to another world only a few miles away: a world of motorways, McDonald’s and high-rise buildings, leading to the secular, Americanised Tel Aviv.

The cluster of spartan white huts has only just sprouted up among the dark hills and vine terraces that separate the Dead Sea from the eastern Mediterranean’s edge; in any other, less troubled landscape, the huts would have little significance. There are only five of them, planted at the end of a newly carved half-mile of muddy track, tucked into a hillside with a commanding view – on a clear winter’s morning – of the plains that lead to another world only a few miles away: a world of motorways, McDonald’s and high-rise buildings, leading to the secular, Americanised Tel Aviv.
But here, in the tense and dangerous Israeli-occupied West Bank, at the smouldering heart of the territorial battle between Israel and the Palestinians, these mean and lowly buildings take on enormous significance. They serve notice that Israel’s army of Jewish settlers has no intention of being intimidated by the bloodshed during the four-month Palestinian intifada aimed at ending its occupation of Arab land. And they serve notice that now, as Ariel Sharon wraps his corpulent form in the mantle of Prime Minister, its determination has risen to new heights.The huts were erected on Tuesday, the day Mr Sharon – the man known as “the Bulldozer” – won his resounding victory, ousting his rival, Ehud Barak, after only 21 months.

As crowds of ecstatic, banner-waving Likud supporters in Tel Aviv prepared to celebrate the old right-winger’s arrival in office with an all-night party, a crane was already busy at work out in the West Bank hills, lowering the buildings into place a few hundred yards south of the perimeter of the settlement of Karmei Tsur.The huts were being set up for new arrivals – a few more Jewish families moving into the occupied territories, enacting another small step in the endless conflict over land, and adding a few more names to the list of settlers that has grown steadily in the past 34 years.Ariel Sharon, now a silver-haired 72, was always seen as the champion of the Jewish settlers. As a cabinet minister, he poured money into settlement-construction. It was he who told Israelis to run and “grab” the hills of the West Bank after Israel signed another interim peace deal with Yasser Arafat. And it is he who now says he will not uproot one of the many scores of settlements that dot the occupied territories. (Barak, by contrast, was talking about removing 20 per cent of them.)So, it was both fitting and depressing that at the exact moment that Sharon was propelled to power with a 25-point majority – on election day itself – Jewish settlers were taking another small bite out of the land that Israel seized in 1967, which the Palestinians have been demanding back ever since in order to build their state.Like most of the settlements, Karmei Tsur itself feels wholly unreal, like a Hollywood movie set on Dartmoor. There is a strong hint of a modern, middle-class corner of a dreary English town – of Stevenage or Harlow or Hitchin.