Minister quits Sharon cabinet in Gaza pullout crisis

10.45am



JERUSALEM - Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon lost his parliamentary majority on Tuesday but seemed in no immediate danger of being toppled after the head of a pro-settler party quit the cabinet over a Gaza pullout plan.

Housing Minister Effi Eitam, leader of the National Religious Party (NRP), and deputy minister Yitzhak Levy of the NRP tendered their resignations to Sharon, who controlled 61 of parliament's 120 seats before the two abandoned him.

However, the NRP's four other legislators made no immediate decision to bolt the coalition and were weighing a compromise to keep the party in the government for at least three more months.

That would grant Sharon, once considered godfather of Jewish settlements on occupied land, a temporary reprieve from total breakdown of his coalition that would force him to reshape his government or call elections.

"From this moment on, we have 59 Knesset members in the coalition," Gideon Saar, head of Sharon's Likud party in parliament, told Channel One television.

Saar noted there was still no unified bloc in parliament able to muster the 61 votes required to bring down the government in a no-confidence vote.

Israeli political commentators said the Labour Party led by Shimon Peres was likely to spread a safety net under Sharon, backing the former general in parliament from the opposition benches, to ensure plans for a Gaza pullout go ahead.

Boosting Sharon, Labour withdrew a no-confidence motion on Monday, a day after the cabinet approved in principle the proposal to remove all 21 Jewish settlements in Gaza and four of the 120 in the West Bank.

In Gaza City, Israeli helicopters fired missiles at what the military said was a workshop containing weapons used by Palestinian militants against Israeli civilians.

Witnesses said motorbikes were manufactured at the workshop and that two people passing by were wounded.

The air strike was launched hours after a rocket fired by militants in the Gaza Strip exploded on a road in the southern Israeli town of Sderot. Five people were treated for shock.

"As a comrade in arms, a cabinet colleague and a brother of the Jewish people, I call upon you Mr Prime Minister: 'Stop! don't hand the country over to terror'." Eitam, a former army officer, wrote in his resignation letter.

Sharon's government has been in the grips of a political crisis since his cabinet voted 14-7 on Sunday in favour of a watered-down version of his US-backed proposal to "disengage" from conflict with the Palestinians.

Palestinians welcome any Israeli withdrawal but fear Sharon is trying to trade impoverished Gaza for large swathes of the West Bank where most of the 240,000 Jewish settlers live.

US President George W Bush backed Sharon's plan as a way of reviving a stalled international peace "road map" for the Middle East, but angered Palestinians seeking their own state by saying Israel could keep chunks of the West Bank.

Sharon pushed the plan through the cabinet only after firing two ultra nationalist ministers and placating Likud dissidents by agreeing not to evacuate settlements for at least nine months and then in four phases, each requiring a vote.

Opponents of the withdrawal say Palestinian militants would regard it as a victory after more then three years of bloodshed.

If the plan is carried out, it would mark Israel's first removal of settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, territories captured in the 1967 Middle East war.

Polls show a majority of Israelis willing to part with Gaza's hard-to-defend settlements, where 7500 Jews live cloistered from 1.3 million Palestinians. However, Sharon's Likud party rejected his pullout plan in a May 2 referendum.

- REUTERS