Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi, Member of the Palestinian Parliament, said the Hamas government should resign for failing to provide the paychecks of the Palestinian civil servants.

Barghouthi, who is also the Secretary General of the Palestinian National Initiative, said in a lecture he gave in Bethlehem on Friday, that the Palestinian banks helped implement the embargo against the Palestinian people as they are agents for Israeli Banks.

He added that the situation in the Palestinian territories is in a high need for a national unity to face the unilateral steps is planning to take in the West Bank. 

He called for supporting the national dialogue as the only salvage of the Palestinians to face this hard situation.

Barghouthi told the audience at the Bethlehem International Center, that the convergence plan of the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is very dangerous, saying that it does not only aim at assuming permanent control over more Palestinian land, especially in Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley, but also would jeopardize the future of the Palestinian and diminish the right of self determination and the establishment of an independent, viable Palestinian state.

Barghouthi used maps that unveil the real face of the Israeli plan, indicating the way is controlling the Palestinian areas through a set of checkpoints and roadblocks that has mounted up to 600.

He also indicated that if the wall is completely built, it will shrink the West Bank into 54 percent of its original area.  The West Bank is 22 percent of Palestine before 1948, which is the area Palestinian accepted to build their independent state on, usually defined as the pre-1967 borders.  This means that this area will be almost 11 percent of the Historic Palestine.

Barghouthi said the wall is building in the West Bank is not a security response to Palestinian resistance attacks, yet, is a plan that the late Prime Minister of Israel Isaac Rabin put during the Oslo peace process.

He also related the route of the wall with the locations of the underground water in the West Bank saying that the wall clearly targets these underground water aquifers.  He added that made arrangements to stop the water that flows to the Gaza Strip from the West Bank which caused the Gaza Strip water to become salt.

Barghouthi also brought statistics showing that the Palestinian resident’s chare of water is 26 cubic meter per year, where as the Israeli resident gets 128 cubic meter per year.  The settlers, who resides the West Bank have a share of 2400 cubic meters per year which indicates the strong relation between the settlements, water and the wall that is planned to annex these settlements into .

Number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank has noticeably increased after pulled out from the Gaza Strip.  The number of settlers removed from Gaza is close to 8 thousand settlers, where as the number of new settlers reaches up to 16 thousand.