Israel moves to clear remaining Gaza settlements

KATIF, Gaza Strip - Israeli forces bypassed a burning barricade and marched into one of the last inhabited Jewish settlements in occupied Gaza on Sunday, hoping to completely evacuate the biggest bloc of enclaves in the area.

Confrontation loomed as several hundred young radicals, reinforcing dozens of settler families that ignored last week's army directive to leave the Gaza Strip, awaited troops sent to remove them from a cluster of settlements.

Protesters set fire to bales of hay, tyres and wooden crates at the main entrance to the settlement of Katif. Dozens of soldiers ignored the barricade, which belched black smoke into the clear summer sky, and entered through a nearby fence.

Katif settler Haim Ben-Arieh said he hoped for Divine intervention.

"The great miracle can happen here, in Katif, with God's help," said Ben-Arieh, a religious Jew.

Only four of the 21 Gaza settlements, built on territory Palestinians want for a state, remain after forced evacuations last week, during which settlers were carried weeping from their homes and protesters were pulled screaming from synagogues.

The World Court says Jewish settlements are illegal. Israel disputes this.

President Mahmoud Abbas decreed that the Palestinian Authority would take over all the settlements as the Israelis pull out under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan to disengage from conflict with the Palestinians.

Palestinians welcome the removal of the Gaza settlers and another 500 from the West Bank, but fear Israel aims to keep most of the other settlements housing 230,000 settlers forever. Some 2.4 million Palestinians live in the West Bank.

Contingents of unarmed soldiers also planned to head to the settlements of Atzmona, a farming community of several hundred people, and to Slav, where most residents have left, to complete the evacuation of the Gush Katif bloc.

Netzarim, an isolated settlement near Gaza City, is due to be emptied on Monday.

HOME DEMOLITIONS

With Palestinian agreement, Israeli forces are due to start full-scale demolition of evacuated settler homes on Sunday.

Withdrawals were suspended on Saturday for the Jewish Sabbath.

Rightists say the withdrawal is a victory for Palestinian militants, a view echoed by the gunmen, and fear that uprooting Gaza's settlements sets a precedent for further pullbacks from the much bigger Israeli enclaves in the occupied West Bank.

"It is clear that we have no chance against (Israeli troops) and the game is up but we are here today to symbolically protest against the pullout," said Meir Bar-Zeev, an 18-year-old West Bank settler who joined protesters in Katif.

More than 85 per cent of Gaza's settlers have gone, but resistance has been reinforced by ultranationalists like those who made stands last week at Neve Dekalim, the biggest settlement, and Kfar Darom, an outlying religious outpost.

Outside one of Atzmona's red-roofed homes, opponents of the withdrawal constructed a cardboard "Cemetery of the Oppressors." Two of the mock gravestones bore the names of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler and Yasser Arafat, the late Palestinian president.

Sharon dubs his plan a "disengagement" from occupied areas he says Israel has no hope of keeping in any peace treaty with the Palestinians.

Opinion polls show most Israelis favor leaving Gaza and saw it as too costly to keep defending the 8,500 settlers who lived there alongside 1.4 million Palestinians.

Evacuations have gone more than twice as fast as officials had predicted, but two remaining settlements in the West Bank, now due to be evacuated on Tuesday, could prove more difficult.

Sanur and Homesh, built on territory where many religious Jews feel an even closer biblical bond than in Gaza, are seen as potential flashpoints because of an influx of rightist Israelis from the most radical West Bank settlements.

Hamas militants said on Saturday that Gaza was "just a stop on the way to liberation" and rejected any suggestion that they could disarm.

- REUTERS