Israeli forces have now evacuated more than 85 per cent of Gaza's Jewish settlers and all should be out by Monday, after nearly 40 years of occupation, police said this morning.
Following three days of forced evacuations, during which settlers were carried weeping from their homes and protesters pulled screaming from synagogues by unarmed soldiers, only four of the 21 settlements in the Gaza Strip remain.
The removal of settlements is the first from land that Palestinians want for a state under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan for "disengagement" from conflict, backed by Washington as a possible step to peace.
In the Gaza Strip, Hamas militants who have largely respected a six-month-old truce reiterated that their
Israeli police use a steel grate to climb onto a roof to evict a family from their home in the Jewish settlement of Gadid.
fight would continue after Israel quit Gaza. The group is committed to destroying the Jewish state.
Police spokesman Avi Zelba said 85 per cent of the houses in Gaza that were once home to 8,500 settlers were now empty. Some 1.4 million Palestinians live in Gaza's densely populated cities and refugee camps.
There were no evacuations today, the Jewish Sabbath. Security forces hope to clear three remaining settlements in Gaza's main Gush Katif settlement bloc on Sunday and outlying
Netzarim on Monday before turning attention to two of four West Bank settlements that are due to be evacuated.
"We expect all the settlements to be evacuated during the next week," Zelba said. A core of radicals opposed to giving up any of the land captured in the 1967 war, which they see as a biblical birthright, is expected to continue to resist in the Gaza settlements and particularly in the West Bank.
Sanur and Homesh, built on territory where many religious Jews feel an even closer biblical bond than in Gaza, are seen as potential flashpoints because of an influx of rightist Israelis from the most radical West Bank settlements.
Police spokesman Avi Zelba
One was caught trying to get in by posing as an army officer with his weapon. Rightists say the withdrawal is a victory for Palestinian militant attacks, a view echoed by the gunmen, and fear that uprooting Gaza's settlements sets a precedent for further pullbacks from the much bigger enclaves in the West Bank.
Palestinians welcome the removal of the Gaza settlers and another 500 from the West Bank, but fear Israel aims to keep most of the other settlements housing 230,000 settlers forever.
Some 2.4 million Palestinians live in the West Bank.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, addressing a cheering crowd in the southern Gaza Strip yesterday, called the evacuation a "great joy".