Settlers in Gaza resist removal

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NEVE DEKALIM, Gaza Strip -- In a day laden with emotion and history, Israeli soldiers began the evacuation of Gaza yesterday by hauling weeping Jewish settlers from their homes and synagogues, defying walls of outraged residents screaming insults and abuse.

Anger over Israel's evacuation of the Gaza Strip after a 38-year military occupation stretched into the West Bank settlement of Shilo, where a Jewish settler grabbed the gun of a security guard and killed four Palestinians and wounded another.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon denounced the attack as Jewish terrorism aimed at torpedoing the withdrawal he had ordered from Gaza and areas of the West Bank. But the evacuation itself, he acknowledged, was "impossible to watch ... without tears in the eyes."

The first forced removal of Jewish settlers in nearly 20 years began at daylight as columns of unarmed police and soldiers in baseball caps quietly fanned out in the streets of Neve Dekalim, pushing aside burning tires and trash cans set aflame by settler youths.

On the last day in their homes, residents ripped their clothes in mourning while lines of soldiers stood at attention in a sign of respect for the evacuees.

In a final desperate bid to stop the disengagement, a 60-year-old settler set herself on fire at a police roadblock in southern Israel, suffering life-threatening injuries. In the Gaza settlement of Kfar Darom, several hundred settlers went on a rampage, pushing large cinder blocks off a bridge and trying to set fire to an Arab house, witnesses said.

Israeli troops brought the fire under control and tried to push the settlers back into Kfar Darom as Palestinians threw stones, the Associated Press reported.

Despite the bitterness of the settlers, resistance was mostly passive on the first day of the operation.

"It went peacefully and fairly smoothly," said a military spokesman. "If this trend continues, then we are looking at a shorter time frame than was previously estimated" for completing the job.

Friction continued into the night, however. Shortly after midnight a band of 15 settler youths punctured the tires of three trucks and thew paintballs at a passenger bus parked outside an improvised military base.