TULKAREM, West Bank (AP) - Mahmoud Abbas, the leading candidate in a January 9 Palestinian presidential election, yesterday called on Israel to tear down its West Bank separation barrier, telling thousands of enthusiastic supporters that the huge structure will never bring peace.

Abbas made the appeal in Tulkarem, a town of 40,000 on the line between Israel and the West Bank, blocked on two sides by the barrier. Israel began building it to stop a wave of Palestinian suicide bombers who were infiltrating unhindered from the West Bank.

"I say to our neighbours... no fence will bring peace or bring you security," Abbas told a rally at a Tulkarem stadium just 500 metres (yards) from the barrier.

The complex of walls, fences, trenches, barbed wire and electronic devices, still under construction, roughly follows the "Green Line," the 1949 cease-fire line that divided Israel from the West Bank until 1967, when Israel captured the territory.

In some places, however, the barrier is designed to dip into the West Bank to include Jewish settlements, taking West Bank land and cutting Palestinians off from their farmland and services.

Palestinians say if the Israelis want to build a wall, they should keep it on their own side of the "Green Line." Israel doesn't recognise the cease-fire line as a border, insisting that the final boundary must be negotiated.

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