Israeli troops pull out of Southern Gaza area

4.00pm

UPDATE - GAZA - Israeli soldiers pulled out of part of a key neighbourhood in southern Gaza's Rafah district on Monday after a six-day siege to uncover weapons tunnels that was roundly condemned by the international community.

Several tanks were spotted rolling out of the Tel Sultan area of Rafah, just hours after Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon pledged to put a revised plan to evacuate Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip to a cabinet vote by next week.

Egypt's Intelligence Chief Omar Suleiman was due to hold talks with Palestinians later on Monday about the Sharon's plan.

An Israeli military source said the pullout was part of a "new deployment" aimed to "ease conditions" and allow residents to leave their homes to stock up on food, water and medicine.

But Israeli troops remained in at least one other Rafah stronghold, known as the Brazil camp, witnesses said.

Israeli troops battled militants and bulldozed homes in Tel Sultan, the scene of some of heaviest fighting in the incursion which killed 42 Palestinians and left hundreds homeless since May 18.

Israel launched its largest raid in Gaza for years to hunt for tunnels used to smuggle arms from Egypt after 13 Israeli soldiers were killed in a string of ambushes and a settler woman and her four children were killed in a separate attack.

But television footage of Palestinian refugees picking through the rubble of some 35 homes wrecked by army tanks and bulldozers sparked a world outcry and even sparked a row inside Sharon's cabinet.

Israeli Justice Minister Yosef Lapid, a Holocaust survivor, touched a raw nerve in Israel by saying the sight of an elderly Palestinian woman searching through the rubble of her home reminded him of his grandmother who died in a Nazi death camp.

"I saw on television an old woman picking through the rubble of her house in Rafah, looking for her medicine, and she reminded me of my grandmother who was expelled from her home during the Holocaust," political sources quoted him as saying.

He urged the cabinet to halt the demolitions.

Sharon, speaking later at a ceremony inaugurating a memorial to fallen soldiers, said Sunday he was determined to push through a plan to withdraw step-by-step from Gaza, and several Jewish settlements from parts of the West Bank as well.

"I am about to present to the cabinet next week the stages of the plan and to obtain its approval," Sharon, a former general of several Arab-Israeli wars told those gathered at a new memorial to Israel's 1948 war for independence.

A senior official said Sharon would present an amended plan to evacuate Jewish settlers from Gaza at the next cabinet meeting scheduled for May 30. The 7500 settlers occupy 20 per cent of Gaza land surrounded by 1.3 million Palestinians.

The original pullout plan was defeated in a May 2 referendum of Sharon's rightist Likud party.

Israel's Channel One television said the new blueprint calls for a phased withdrawal in four stages from Israel's 21 settlements in Gaza. The first proposal, rejected by Likud, called for the settlements to be dismantled in one move.

A senior aide to Palestinian President Yasser Arafat told Israel Radio on Sunday the Palestinians "would be glad" to see a Gaza pullout by Israel, but only as part of a wider withdrawal from occupied land co-ordinated with the Palestinian Authority.

"No withdrawal will achieve peace or security unless it is co-ordinated with the Palestinians," Jibril Rajoub said.

- REUTERS