JERUSALEM, July 5 (Xinhuanet) -- Israel and the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) have reached an agreement on the creation of an overland connection between Gaza and the West Bank following the Gaza pullout, Israel Radio said on Tuesday.

    Under the agreement, at a first stage Israeli security forces will escort convoys of Palestinian vehicles travelling between the two areas. In the future Israel has proposed linking the two major Palestinian territories by railroad.

    The railroad would link the Erez industrial zone in northern Gaza to the Tarqumiyeh checkpoint near the West Bank town of Hebron, about 60 kilometers south of Jerusalem. The World Bank estimates that this would cost as much as 175 million US dollars and take three years to build.

    The World Bank proposed that instead, a four-lane sunken highwaybe built in a five-meter-deep trench that would slice Israel in two.

    The trench would be surrounded by double fences to keep people from leaving it for Israeli territory, and Israeli traffic would cross it via overpasses.

    The bank believes that this would cost only 130 million dollars to build and would also be cheaper to operate.

    The overland link has been a focus of contention throughout the Israeli-Palestinian talks on Israel's plan of disengagement to withdraw all settlements from Gaza and four of the 120 settlements from the West Bank.

    For months, the Palestinians refused to discuss the withdrawal at all, wanting instead to focus on the "safe passage" between Gazaand the West Bank, which was promised under the Oslo Accord but never implemented.

    Israel and the PNA have recently turned to the Middle East Quartet (US, Russia, EU and UN) and the World Bank requesting to review the proposals and assess their costs.

    James Wolfensohn, the Quartet's envoy on the disengagement, recently said there has been significant progress in Israeli-Palestinian talks on economic and civil aspects of the disengagement. Enditem