advertisement  |
By Matt Spetalnick and Dan Williams SANUR/HOMESH, West Bank (Reuters) - Israel completed a withdrawal of 9,000 Jewish settlers from occupied territory on Tuesday after police ejected ultranationalist protesters making emotional last stands in two West Bank enclaves. Predictions of long, tough resistance to evacuation proved wrong just as they did in Gaza where troops cleared out 8,500 settlers from all 21 enclaves two weeks ahead of schedule in a move to "disengage" from conflict with Palestinians. The two sides now face the challenge of translating Israel's first dismantling of settlements on land that Palestinians want for a future state into a fresh Middle East peace process after years of bloody stalemate. Police stormed a citadel and synagogues in the Sanur and Homesh enclaves fortified by some 1,000 radicals, drawing a hail of bottles, light bulbs, paint, ketchup, eggs, tomatoes, cooking oil and flour in their effort to extract diehard settlers. Some were plucked from a synagogue roof in the scoop of one of the bulldozers that had rammed through barriers of burning tires and rubbish at the gates to neighboring Sanur and Homesh. There was a brief melee on one Homesh house roof after police, holding up shields to deflect projectiles hurled by youths, scaled ladders and scrambled over a razor-wire barricade to tackle the recalcitrant protesters. As the operation was declared complete, police grabbed last holdouts on the roof of an old citadel and pushed them kicking and screaming into a shipping container that was then lowered by crane to a waiting bus. "Sanur and Homesh are clear of settlers," said national police spokesman Avi Zelba. U.S.-led diplomats count on Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's "disengagement plan" to kickstart a "road map" peace plan for a viable Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, where evacuations of settlers wrapped up on Monday. Palestinians want Israel to hand over all of the two lands and Arab East Jerusalem for their capital. But Sharon has vowed to keep all of Jerusalem and large West Bank settlements where some 230,000 Jews live among 2.4 million Palestinians. Jewish ultrarightists tried to make the withdrawal from a pocket of the northern West Bank more painful than the generally smooth evacuation from Gaza to deter Israel from ever again ceding settlements on land taken in the 1967 Middle East war.
Continued ...
© Reuters 2005. All Rights Reserved.
|