Printer Friendly | Email Article | Reprints | RSS

(Page 1 of 3)

Top News Suspect Caught in Atlanta Court Shootings UN to Get Syria Timetable for Lebanon Pullout Iran Defiant in Face of United U.S., EU Approach MORE

GUSH KATIF, Gaza Strip (Reuters) - After Elkana Gubi was killed in a Palestinian ambush three years ago, his family refused a burial with military honors in Jerusalem.

They preferred the fenced-off plot outside their embattled Jewish settlement.

Now Gubi's and 47 other graves, silent testaments to the settlers' claim on land they see as a biblical birthright, have become a front line of defiance ahead of Israel's planned withdrawal from the occupied Gaza Strip.

"Elkana always wanted to be buried in Gush Katif," Gubi's mother Miri told Reuters in Gaza's main settlement bloc.

"Anything necessary to protect my son's final rest, I will do -- anything."

Such talk, echoed by other settlers, adds to fears of violent resistance to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan for quitting some of the occupied land where Palestinians want a state as a way of "disengaging" from conflict.

The umbrella Yesha settler council has called for passive protests only, but no one denies that the exhumation of the bodies of loved ones could intensify grief.

"Politics aside, the fact is that these people are invested in the land, and have endured four years of fighting," said Maoz Azaryahu, a Haifa University cultural geographer. "The graves are a focal point for this trauma."

The Evacuation and Compensation Bill passed by parliament last month requires the government to "do its best to move the Gush Katif cemetery to Israel and take care of reburial."

The somewhat vague phrasing has further incensed settlers complaining that the disengagement plan ignores their concerns.

"No one has contacted me about anything," said Shlomo Yulis, whose son Itay died of cancer and was buried in Gush Katif.    Continued ...

1 | 2 | 3   Next

More Life & Leisure Fear Drives Long Trek to Kenya from Darfur Scottish Writer Aids Revival of British Crime Fiction Peru Writer Vargas Llosa New Novel Looks to Love Settler Graves on Front Line Against Gaza Pullout China Close to Production of 'Safe' Genetic Rice MORE