Evacuation of the illegal West Bank settlement outpost of Migron, which was built on private Palestinian land, is likely to be delayed for another half year, according to a government brief submitted to the High Court of Justice yesterday.

The brief explained that Defense Minister Amir Peretz has ordered the Israel Defense Forces to hold talks with settlement leaders in an effort to reach an agreement on the voluntary evacuation of all the illegal outposts "in the near future." If these talks bear no fruit, it said, Peretz plans to order Migron evacuated in about half a year.

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It also asked the court to postpone the next hearing on the case for four or five months, to give the state time to exhaust the possibility of negotiations and to update the court on their outcome.

On October 16, Peretz told the Knesset that he was allocating only another two weeks to the IDF-settler talks, and that if no agreement were reached by then, the IDF would begin forcibly evacuating outposts in early November. However, yesterday's brief to the court indicates that not only were the talks not ended in November, but that Peretz intends to give them another several weeks.

Though final demolition orders have already been issued for all the houses in Migron, the army has not yet carried out any of these orders. Two months ago, therefore, Peace Now, along with several Palestinians who claim to own the land on which Migron was built, petitioned the court to order the army to demolish the houses.

In its brief to the court, however, the state argued that its timetable for evacuating the outpost must be subject both to coordination with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and to "changes in the circumstances and relevant constraints - security, legal or other."

The last time the court heard a similar case, it ended up ordering the prompt demolition of nine permanent but not yet occupied houses in the outpost of Amona. That demolition sparked a bloody battle between police and settlers in February 2006. Migron, which contains 60 caravans and two permanent houses, is home to 43 families.

The petition argued that Migron was built on private Palestinian land, without permission from either the owners or the relevant government authorities, and must therefore be demolished. The petitioners, it added, repeatedly pointed this out to the authorities and asked them first to prevent the construction, then to prevent people from moving in and finally to evacuate the residents, but all of these requests have been ignored.

In its brief, the state agreed the outpost was built on private Palestinian land, and therefore, "there is no legal possibility of accepting its existence in the long term."

"The only questions on the agenda are the timing of the outpost's evacuation and whether it will be evacuated voluntarily by the residents, and its buildings demolished by [the residents] themselves, or whether it will be necessary to employ the authorities for this purpose," the brief said.