JERUSALEM, 27 October 2004 — Israel’s divided Parliament yesterday 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, Sharon lawmakers voted 67-45 with seven abstentions for what would be the first evacuation of Jewish settlers from land Palestinians seek for a state.

But launching the pullout would require a vote by Sharon’s coalition Cabinet set for next March. 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.

It took the support of Shimon Peres’ main opposition Labour Party to push the proposal through the 120-member Knesset. 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 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.

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.

“I have decided to go right through to the end with this separation. I am convinced this separation will strengthen Israel,” Sharon told MPs at the start of the debate. Palestinians say Sharon’s plan will kill off a long-stalled peace process and deny them a viable state in Gaza and the West Bank.

Meanwhile, the Israeli Supreme Court demanded explanations from the Israeli Army yesterday over the scale of the destruction of Palestinian homes in the Rafah region of the Gaza Strip, judicial sources said.

The court was responding to a petition filed by the Arab-Israeli rights group Adalah which accuses the military of having perpetrated “war crimes” with the demolition of the large number of houses in the town which borders Egypt.

Chief Justice Aaron Barak said that the accusations could not be taken lightly and demanded that the army appoint a senior officer to hold an inquiry into the scale of the destruction and then report back to the court.

The campaign of demolitions, which has seen around 1,500 houses bulldozed in the Rafah region since the September 2000 start of the Palestinian uprising, was recently denounced in a Human Rights Watch report as in clear violation of international law and without military justification.

The Gaza Strip, one of the most densely populated areas in the world, is home to around 1.3 million Palestinians who struggle against often overwhelming levels of poverty and violence.

Each square kilometer shelters an average of 2,350 Palestinian inhabitants, who live alongside a total of 8,000 Jewish settlers.

Of the Palestinian population, around 900,000 are refugees that were expelled or left their homes after the creation of Israel in 1948, and their offspring.

Half of those live in eight camps managed by the UN. Situated to the southwest of Israel and bordering Egypt, this coastal region covers 362 square kilometers, some 45 kilometers in length by six to 10 kilometers wide.

Owing to an almost uninterrupted Israeli Army blockade of the territory, Gaza laborers have been largely unable to cross into Israel for work during the four-year Palestinian uprising, and unemployment stands at about 45 percent.

More than half of the population lives in poverty, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics.

The Gaza Strip has also been segmented into three areas by troops, which hampers the freedom of movement and goods inside the Palestinian territory.

The Palestinian Authority exercises sovereignty on some 67 percent of the land, with the remaining 33 percent is occupied by the Jewish settlements dotted from north to south and whose security is looked after by an Israeli Army division.

The army tends to carry out short, sharp operations inside the Gaza Strip and along the almost-hermetic security barrier, set up to prevent Palestinian attacks in Israeli territory.

Raids have been particularly deadly in the past six months, with Israel trying to stamp out arm smuggling from nearby Egypt via underground tunnels and to quell militant rocket and mortar attacks at Gaza settlements and southern Israeli towns.