MIDDLE EAST: In a gesture of resolve in the face of resistance to the planned pull-out of Jewish settlers from occupied Gaza this summer, Israeli troops yesterday ejected extremists from a stronghold in a coastal settlement strip.
The storming of the derelict Palm Beach Hotel in the main Gaza settlement block of Gush Katif follows days of mounting violence from the radical squatters, who have twice attacked Palestinians living in a nearby enclave.
Hundreds of heavily armed soldiers and combat police used ladders to scale the whitewashed building and broke down doors, searching room-to-room for more than 100 activists who in recent weeks had barricaded themselves in the premises.
In a swift operation, settlers, many of them teenagers, were dragged and carried out kicking and screaming, some in handcuffs. The squatters were loaded on to buses and police said four arrests were made. Before the raid, the army declared the Gaza settlements a "closed military zone" and allowed only residents to enter.
"They have all been removed. There's no doubt they were preparing for siege here. We found boarded-up windows and supplies of tyres and bottles filled with fuel," Gen Dan Harel, the Israeli military commander in the Gaza region, said after the operation was completed.
Nadia Matar, a well-known far-right activist who had become a spokeswoman for the squatters, shouted at police expelling her: "Cossacks! Cossacks! Shame on the government for expelling Jews as if they were in Russia."
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's phased unilateral withdrawal of some 8,000 settlers from all 21 settlements in occupied Gaza Strip, as well as four in the West Bank, is scheduled to start on August 15th.
However yesterday's raid was an opening gambit; an attempt to quash the hardcore resistance to the disengagement plan in Gaza and signal the government's commitment to the pull-out.
Several weeks ago, Jewish settlers and their supporters began checking into the 140-room Palm Beach Hotel, an attractive and once-popular tourist resort which was closed after the outbreak of the Palestinian intifada or uprising in 2000 when militants started raining gunfire and mortars in the area.
Under the eyes of Israeli soldiers, they bedecked it with flags, renovated its synagogue, surrounded its perimeter with barbed wire coils, placed armed guards at its entrances, and renamed it Maoz Hayam - "fortress by the sea".
Some belonged to the outlawed Kach movement, which advocates the transfer of all Arabs from Israel, and many were from hardline enclaves in the occupied West Bank. Mostly, they were a raggle-taggle bunch of scraggy adolescent boys with wispy beards, side curls and coloured skullcaps.
For weeks now, the permanent settlers of Gaza have been growing increasingly uncomfortable with the presence in their midst of these radicals.
Bryna and Samuel Hilberg, a middle-aged couple who moved to Gush Katif bloc 26 years ago, distanced themselves from the newcomers.
"We've always had good relations with the Arabs in the area and they've ruined the relations we've built up over the years. The only one who this serves, who benefits from the whole thing, is Sharon because it makes us look bad," said Samuel (56), who grows organic cherry tomatoes.
"By having him able to say 'they're such terrible people we should get them out of there'," added Bryna (55), a teacher. "The police know who they are but they didn't want to stop them because they want this violence." Having established the settlement "outpost" in the hotel, the youths last weekend tried to extend their conquered territory to include abandoned beachfront houses in the Al Mawasi village, a coastal Palestinian enclave which is cut off from the rest of Gaza by the Gush Katif settlement bloc.
Last weekend, acting on intelligence that the right-wing groups planned to establish a new stronghold in abandoned holiday homes in Al Mawasi, the army bulldozed 11 houses. Clashes broke out when mostly teenage settlers re- sisted and in the days that followed soldiers played a game of cat-and-mouse with them as they tried to take over abandoned houses, were removed, and then allowed to return.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, the settlers stood on the roof of an unfinished three-storey villa singing religious songs and taun-ting angry Palestinian youths who had filled the terrace of an adjacent house to ensure it too was not taken over by settlers.
Yellow flags of the Kach movement flew over the house, which belongs to a Palestinian merchant, and the squatters scrawled in huge lettering in Hebrew on the marble-clad walls the slogan "Mohammed is a Pig". On Wed- nesday morning, the owner of the neighbouring house, Ibraham Atal (38) questioned why the Israeli soldiers looked on as the settler youths roamed freely in the area. "We never had a problem with the settlers who live in Gush Katif itself," he said. "They never made any trouble for us. It's only these new settlers who come from Hebron and Jerusalem who cause trouble."
Later in the day, both sides hurled stones at each other and in the worst of the violence an Arab teenager was set upon by youths who tried to stone him to death. On Wednesday evening, the army expelled the settlers from the abandoned house.