Settlers lash out as Army starts dismantling outpost

They came in their hundreds, picking their way across fields and up the steep hillsides to gather on a remote, windswept hilltop in the West Bank.

From a distance, it looked like some great ritual gathering, but as you got close you could see the crowd on the hill punching and kicking one another.

People were dragged by their shoulders, pushed and shoved in a great scrum that went on and on. From time to time there was a yelp of pain or a cry of rage. And every now and then people came rushing out of the crowd carrying a stretcher with someone writhing on top of it.

This was the scene as the Israeli Army tried to dismantle the first inhabited Jewish settlement in the West Bank to be cleared under the roadmap peace plan.

With the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, due for urgent talks on the peace plan backed by President George W. Bush, the Israeli Army finally decided to go ahead with the evacuations it has been putting off for weeks.

On the road to the settlement, a couple of Army bulldozers were stuck, unable to move forwards because a crowd of settlers was sitting in front of them. It was extraordinary to see the Israeli Army, which regularly uses live ammunition against Palestinian protesters, brought to a standstill by a few unarmed youths.

When peace activists tried the same tactic against Israeli bulldozers trying to tear down Palestinian houses in the Gaza Strip, it went tragically wrong and an American activist, Rachel Corrie, was crushed to death by a bulldozer.

But it was Israeli houses that were being demolished here, and the Army was being careful. Most of the soldiers were armed only with knives.

Although 30 people were wounded, it was hard to escape the impression this was all something of a show for Powell's benefit.

The word was the Americans were demanding some sort of action on the roadmap from the Israelis to coincide with the Secretary of State's visit, and the Israeli Army, which usually shoos journalists away, especially when it is demolishing Palestinian houses, went out of its way to give reporters access so there would be plenty of pictures.

From the drama on the hilltop, you would think hundreds of people were about to lose their homes, and the whole settlement project was under threat. In fact, all the Army came to tear down was a couple of tents, a rather temporary looking concrete house with a tin roof and a small metal hut that looked as if it was about to collapse under the weight of the photographers and cameramen who climbed on top of it.

Bush has said the issue of the settlements must be "dealt with". They are built on the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, the remaining 22 per cent of British-mandate Palestine where the Palestinians want to set up the independent state they are promised under the roadmap.

The settlements, all of which are illegal under international law, and the bypass roads for the settlers to reach them, cut the West Bank into swathes and make setting up a state here difficult.

At the Aqaba summit, Ariel Sharon pledged to dismantle only the "unauthorised outposts", small hilltops seized by ideological settlers without Israeli Government permission, like the one at Mitzpe Yitzhar, precisely in order to claim the land as Jewish and prevent a Palestinian state being set up here.

In the opposite direction from the one in which the cameras were pointing were five more hilltops, each with a couple of wooden houses or a portable cabin on top, all of them settlements that are as much an obstacle to a peace deal as the tents of Mitzpe Yitzhar, but none of them scheduled to be dismantled because they were put up before the cut-off date in the roadmap when Ariel Sharon came to power as Israeli Prime Minister.

As one of the young settlers who walked for miles to get around police roadblocks to reach Mitzpe Yitzhar put it: "This is just a present from Israel for Mr Powell." His grandparents on his mother's side emigrated to Israel from Britain, he said. He lived in the West Bank settlement of Gush Etzion, south of Bethlehem.

The settlers were adamant that if the soldiers succeeded in dismantling the settlement, they would just wait a few days and come back here. But it didn't stop the "Hilltop Youth" from making a spirited defence of Mitzpe Yitzhar.

The "Hilltop Youth" are young settlers known for attacking Palestinian areas and getting into fights with the Israeli Army. They decided to walk up the main street of Hawara, a Palestinian village, and the Israeli security forces had to send six armoured jeeps full of soldiers and police to stop them causing any trouble.

The youths resembled English football hooligans, standing in the way of cars, trying to pick fights with news photographers and running into the kicking and punching fray yelling in excitement.

They had set fire to the hillsides to stop the soldiers reaching Mitzpe Yitzhar. The burning wheatfields that sent choking smoke into the sky belonged, of course, to Palestinian farmers.

Eventually, the soldiers pushed their way through the scrum and a tent came down to ironic applause from the settlers. Two soldiers carried it away, but the fight went on over the rest of Mitzpe Yitzhar.

If all the settler outposts are this difficult to dismantle, it will be a long summer.

- INDEPENDENT