Plan for gradual Gaza pullout
Mr Sharon’s plan for a gradual Gaza withdrawal replaces a pullout plan rejected by his Likud Party earlier this month.
In the Rafah refugee camp, thousands of Palestinians buried 16 of the 41 people killed in a six-day Israeli offensive, chanting “Death to America! Death to Israel!” Israeli troops withdrew from a Rafah neighbourhood, leaving behind streets flooded with sewage and lined with damaged homes and crushed cars.
Israeli forces remained in other areas of the camp to search for militants and weapons-smuggling tunnels. The scale of destruction has prompted international condemnation and growing criticism in Israel.
In the West Bank, troops briefly entered the city of Nablus, killing a 14-year-old Palestinian boy while dispersing stone throwers.
Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman met with Mr Sharon yesterday to discuss new security arrangements between the two countries after a Gaza pull-back, a Palestinian official said on condition of anonymity. Israel and Egypt need to review their border agreements and provide for the possible entry of Egyptian military advisers to Gaza to help train Palestinian police, the official said.
Mr Suleiman told Mr Arafat that Egypt will help train Palestinian security forces to be deployed in Gaza after a withdrawal.
Mr Sharon, meanwhile, is trying to craft a new formula for a pullout plan to present to his Cabinet next Sunday. Likud members rejected the withdrawal plan on May 2, and Mr Sharon is not assured of a Cabinet majority for the revised proposal, which calls for a staged pullout from all of Gaza and four small West Bank settlements.
Israeli troops withdrew yesterday from Rafah’s Tel Sultan neighbourhood, the first to be targeted in the operation. Witnesses said Israeli tanks also pulled back from residential streets in the camp’s Brazil area and withdrew from positions on the sparsely populated edge of Rafah town.
The army said it was redeploying forces and not withdrawing.
"These trees were planted by my grandfather, and now they came and uprooted them for nothing except destruction and killing," said farmer Suleiman Abu Halwa, 59, holding the branch of an uprooted olive tree.
In the past week, eight homes were demolished and dozens damaged in Tel Sultan, home to 25,000 Palestinians, local officials said. Bulldozers flattened dozens of acres of greenhouses and farmland.
Farmer Suleiman Taha, 45, said he grew carnations and vegetables and lost his €60,000 investment.
"It's like a desert now," he said.
An estimated 35,000 people joined an emotional funeral procession in Tel Sultan for 16 Palestinians killed in the Israeli offensive.
Residents had been unable to reach the bodies for nearly a week, touching a nerve because Islam requires immediate burial of the dead. They retrieved the bodies yesterday from a vegetable refrigerator serving as a makeshift morgue.
Crowds chanted and gunmen fired automatic weapons into the air as the bodies, covered in Islamic flags, were taken to a stadium and were buried later.
