JERUSALEM, 17 June 2005 — Israel’s imminent withdrawal from the occupied Gaza Strip will see the country strengthen control over strategic nerve centers such as Jerusalem, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said yesterday.
“It amounts to a decision to leave an area of less security importance in order to strengthen those with a high strategic value for us,” the prime minister told a development forum in the northern Israeli town of Carmiel.
“The disengagement plan cannot be summed up just as leaving Gaza. It also invests big efforts in developing the Galilee, the Negev and greater Jerusalem,” added Sharon.
The prime minister also used the forum to reiterate his determination to implement the disengagement blueprint “precisely on schedule”.
Israel is to withdraw all soldiers and more than 8,000 Jewish settlers living in Gaza and four northern West Bank settlements in a 10-week process from mid-August.
Sharon’s blueprint has incited tremendous opposition from settlers, ultra-nationalist Israelis and members of his own right-wing Likud party.
Israel annexed east Jerusalem after the 1967 Middle East war, passing a law in 1980 which declared the whole city as its undivided capital, but the move is not recognized by the international community.
Palestinians also claim Jerusalem as the capital of their promised future state.
The northern Galilee and southern Negev regions are often mentioned as possible relocation sites for Jewish settlers pulled out of Gaza.
Israel Installs New Homes for Gaza Settlers
The first batch of hundreds of mobile homes for Gaza settlers who are to be uprooted from the Palestinian territory this summer were yesterday being installed in a coastal area of southern Israel.
Around a dozen of the prefabricated homes, which can easily house a family of five and cost thousands of dollars each, were being installed in the picturesque Nitzanim Dunes area close to the Mediterranean city of Ashkelon.
A number of Gaza Strip residents traveled to Nitzanim to inspect the new homes — due to house a large chunk of the 8,000 Jewish settlers.
Ilan Cohen, the director general of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s office, said a total of 450 of the giant caravans would eventually be installed, 350 of which had already been ordered.
However, the first trailers were erected under the cover of darkness to prevent ultra-nationalist opponents of the so-called disengagement plan from sabotaging the buildings.
“We decided to do it in a way that would prevent provocations and all sorts of things like that,” Cohen told army radio.
Yair Dahan, a local resident, accused the government of acting dictatorially with the high court yet to rule on petitions from environmentalists and locals unhappy at the thought of having their idyll spoilt by thousands of newcomers.
“These things are being done while the issue is sub judice in the high court and to my great regret, the people responsible for Israeli democracy, behave like pawns in the hands of Ariel Sharon when they hear disengagement.”
