Israel's divided parliament has approved Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's US-backed plan to withdraw from the occupied Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank.
After a fierce two-day debate, lawmakers voted by 67 to 45 in favour of what would be the first evacuation of Jewish settlers from land Palestinians seek for a state. There were seven abstentions. Mr Sharon's cabinet must now vote on each of the four phases of withdrawal, starting with the first one in March.
It took the support of Mr Shimon Peres's main opposition Labour party to push the proposal through the 120-member Knesset.
Mr Sharon's victory came at a price for the former general: the plan has splintered his governing coalition and turned many members of his right-wing Likud party against him. He had threatened to sack any member of his cabinet who failed to back the plan.
Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said after the vote he and three other Likud cabinet members from would quit unless the prime minister agreed to hold a referendum on the pullout.
"We ... have decided to give the prime minister two weeks to announce a referendum, and if not, we will not be able to see ourselves as staying in this government," Mr Netanyahu told reporters in parliament.
The resignation of the four ministers could make it hard for Mr Sharon to avoid holding early elections. Mr Netanyahu is a former prime minister and the main rival to Mr Sharon in the right-wing Likud party. Mr Sharon has ruled out a referendum, describing it as a stalling tactic.
Mr Sharon, once the Jewish settlers' champion but now the target of their ire, told parliament a pullout from Gaza by the end of 2005 would increase Israel's security and allow it to seal its grip on larger West Bank settlements.
Some 8,000 Israelis live in the Gaza Strip in hard-to-defend settlements among 1.3 million Palestinians. Under Mr Sharon's plan, all Gaza settlers will be evacuated in return for hundreds of thousands of dollars in state compensation per family.
Four of the 120 settlements Israel has built in the West Bank since it captured that territory along with the Gaza Strip in the 1967 Middle East war are to be removed.
Polls show most Israelis regard Gaza as a liability that Israel should be rid of. The latest opinion survey, published by Israel's largest daily Yedioth Ahronothtoday, found 65 per cent in favour of "disengagement" and 26 per cent opposed.
However, as the parliamentary debate raged, anti-pullout nationalists, many of them settler women and children holding placards saying "Sharon is a traitor", rallied outside a Knesset ringed by police.