Gaza pull-out ends with settlers’ tearful farewells

THE last Israeli settlers in the Gaza Strip yesterday staged a tearful farewell procession past deserted homes, then left in convoys of armoured buses for Israel, ending a turbulent presence that critics have long denounced as a stumbling block to peace.

In the West Bank, thousands of troops surrounded two small settlements where some 2,000 extremists have holed up with an arsenal of stun grenades, gas canisters and automatic weapons, defying orders to leave.

Troops were due to move into the settlements after dawn today, in the riskiest operation yet of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s plan to “disengage” from some Palestinian territory.

Palestinians were thrilled to see the end of the Israeli civilian presence in the overcrowded coastal strip that Israel captured from Egypt in the 1967 war.

Gaza, home to 1.3 million mostly impoverished Palestinians, has been devastated by frequent battles between Israeli forces and militants.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas had a five-minute phone conversation last night to discuss the Israeli pullout.

The Gaza pullout represents the first time Israel is abandoning territory claimed by the Palestinians for their future state.

In the final day of the evacuation of Israeli civilians from Gaza, dozens of Netzarim’s families prayed in the community’s synagogue, weeping without control as the Torah scrolls were taken from their ark for the last time. Then they held a procession behind the Torahs and a giant candelabra.

Soldiers and settlers walked arm-in-arm to the waiting red-and-white buses with tinted bulletproof windows that would take them out of Gaza. The five-year-old daughter of the rabbi put a handful of sand in her purse.

Within a few days, Netzarim will be demolished by bulldozers, as Israel destroys homes in all 21 former settlements.

Mr Abbas said Israel’s unilateral withdrawal was only the first step.

“Tomorrow they will start leaving part of the West Bank,” Mr Abbas told a group 400 disabled Palestinians wounded in uprisings against Israel.

“It’s a beginning of the full withdrawal from all the settlements. We will not close our eyes, we will not rest until they leave from all our land.”

Meanwhile, the Israeli army was bracing for potential violence in the West Bank, which many nationalist Israelis consider the heartland of the biblical Land of Israel.

In Sanur, the most hardline West Bank settlement earmarked for evacuation, young men were welding bars on to the open windows of an old British building known as “the fortress”

On the roof settlers flew a hand-painted Israeli flag that was taken from a refugee boat in 1947 that was trying to break the British blockade of pre-independence Israel. Painted on a sign under the flag were the words: “The British didn’t succeed in expelling. And You?”