Hebron section closed off after riots

The Israeli military has declared the Jewish section of the West Bank city of Hebron a closed zone, banning non-residents, after three days of riots by Israeli settlers and extremist backers against an order to evict Jewish squatters from the Arab market.

The closure order, issued late yesterday by the area army commander, Major General Yair Naveh, is in effect until January 22, according to a military statement.

The scuffles could signal the opening salvo in a battle over the West Bank, if Israel follows its pullout from the Gaza Strip last summer with further withdrawals from territory that has far more biblical resonance.

Settler leaders and rabbis demanded that acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert back down and abandon his plan to dismantle the outpost in a Hebron market and several other unauthorised settlements across the West Bank slated for destruction in the coming weeks.

Olmert stood his ground, saying he ordered security forces to deal sternly with the defiant settlers.

“There will be no forgiveness or compromises with this unacceptable behaviour,” he said yesterday. “There are red lines that we will not allow to be crossed.”

The fight over Hebron, where tradition says the biblical Jewish patriarchs are buried, has special resonance for the settlers. Many of the settlers here are extreme religious nationalists and the city has been the scene of harsh fighting during the five years of Israeli-Palestinian violence.

Hebron is the only West Bank city divided between Palestinian and Israeli zones. Israeli forces control the centre of the city, where about 500 settlers live in several compounds. Settlers often clash with local Palestinians.

Olmert spoke about Hebron after being named acting head of the centrist Kadima Party in place of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who suffered a massive stroke on January 4.

Sharon formed Kadima last year after rebellious lawmakers from his hardline Likud Party tried to torpedo his pullout from Gaza and four isolated West Bank settlements. Many Israelis assumed Sharon planned further withdrawals if his party won March 28 elections as polls indicate.

Hoping to show the government that future withdrawals will not be as painless as the Gaza pullout, hundreds of protesters flocked to Hebron – where the settlers live among 170,000 Palestinians – to fight eviction orders given to eight settler families.

The families moved into an empty Palestinian market four years ago after Palestinian gunmen killed a 10-month-old Jewish baby and they ignored an Israeli court order that gave them until January 15 to leave voluntarily. The army said it would remove them within a month.

“It’s important to say ’no’,” settler spokesman David Wilder said. “You can’t let them chop up your land and give it to your enemy.”

The protesters, many of them teenagers and some of them masked, began rampaging through the area on Friday, torching empty Palestinian shops and a home, throwing stones at Palestinian houses and trying to rush off-limits areas of the city.

Yesterday, hundreds of youths milled about the market and ate fruit and bread left out for them in huge crates. Many wore t-shirts left over from the Gaza protests, reading: ”We won’t forget, we won’t forgive.” One wore a set of dog tags listing all the dismantled settlements.

Suddenly, riot police, border police and officers on horseback charged through the market and into the nearby Avraham Avinu settlement enclave, where many of the youth had camped out on mattresses scattered across the floor of a guest house.

The police stormed the buildings and forced the youth to evacuate the rooftops where they had fled.

The protesters hurled curses at the police, shoved them and called them American lackeys. Three girls were arrested, police said.

Israel’s police commander in Hebron, Avi Harush, said the operation targeted “those same lawbreakers especially the masked people … who are throwing rocks, paint and other objects at us, and the goal is to bring them down from the rooftops and restore control to the police and the army”.

“We have a zero-tolerance policy against people who use violence against police and soldiers and vandalise Palestinian property,” he said.

Two separate groups of rabbis sent letters to Olmert yesterday demanding he cancel the plan to evacuate the market and other outposts. One letter, signed by 20 rabbis, warned Olmert that he courted personal tragedy if he withdrew from any of “the Land of Israel”.

The second letter, sent by a group of settler rabbis, called the eviction orders “a war against God and his Messiah”.