Sharon fires two ministers over Gaza vote

1.00pm

JERUSALEM - Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon today fired a rebel cabinet minister and deputy cabinet minister after they voted against his plan to withdraw from the Gaza Strip next year, Israeli media said.

Cabinet minister Uzi Landau and deputy minister Michael Ratzon were both sent letters of dismissal shortly after Sharon comfortably won a key parliamentary vote on his Gaza plan.

Sharon had earlier threatened to fire all Likud ministers and deputy ministers who voted against the plan. Both Landau and Ratzon were vehement opponents of a Gaza withdrawal and had helped lead a Likud mutiny against the plan.

"He fulfilled his pledge. Those who opposed the vote were fired," said Sharon spokesman Raanan Gissin.

Israel's divided parliament today approved Sharon's US-backed plan to withdraw from the occupied Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank. After a fierce two-day debate, Sharon lawmakers voted 67-45 with seven abstentions for what would be the first evacuation of Jewish settlers from land Palestinians seek for a state.

But launching the pullout will require a vote by Sharon's coalition cabinet set for next March.

It took the support of Shimon Peres' main opposition Labour party to push the proposal through the 120-member Knesset.

Sharon, once the Jewish settlers' champion but now the target of their ire, told parliament a pullout from Gaza by the end of 2005 would increase Israel's security and allow it to seal its grip on larger West Bank settlements.

Some 8000 Israelis live in the Gaza Strip in hard-to-defend settlements among 1.3 million Palestinians. Under Sharon's plan, all Gaza settlers will be evacuated in return for hundreds of thousands of dollars in state compensation per family.

Four of the 120 settlements Israel has built in the West Bank since it captured that territory along with the Gaza Strip in the 1967 Middle East war are to be removed.

As the parliamentary debate raged, anti-pullout nationalists, many of them settler women and children holding placards saying "Sharon is a traitor", rallied outside a Knesset ringed by police.

- REUTERS