GAZA CITY, 22 August 2005 — Israel completed the evacuation of its main settlement bloc in the Gaza Strip yesterday and sent troops to the West Bank to clear two of the 120 settlements there. Troops cleared out the settlements of Atzmona, Katif and Slav, the last remaining inhabited settlements in a sprawling cluster in southern Gaza known as Gush Katif. “I can declare the Gush Katif bloc empty of residents,” said Israeli police spokesman Avi Zelba.
Troops also entered Elei Sinai and Nissanit in north Gaza to extract a few families who stayed past the Aug. 16 deadline. The army will go into the remote central enclave of Netzarim today, finishing its shutdown of all 21 Gaza settlements.
Troops in overwhelming numbers brushed past barricades and steel gates to enter the Gaza settlements and escorted residents to evacuation buses.
Massive D9 bulldozers, many driven by Israeli Arabs, tore down homes in Nissanit, Dugit, Peat Sadeh and Ganei Tal. They needed just five minutes to plow through the whitewashed walls of a home, and reduced entire villages to refuse dumps in less than a day. In Ganei Tal, some 40 houses came down in an hour. The claws of excavators ripped apart red tiles and wooden beams like matchstick structures. Broken tables, smashed pipes, toy trucks and children’s clothes littered the streets.
An Israeli Arab tractor driver, Abu Rashed Ali, 42, said the settlers should not have moved to Gaza in the first place. “The mistake was on the part of the state” for sending the settlers to Gaza, he said, and “now it is paying with land and people.”
Cranes lifted prefabricated houses onto flatbed trucks to be taken away to Israel, possibly for temporary housing for displaced settlers.
“They are using the same bulldozers they used in Rafah and Khan Younis, but I feel nothing like what we felt in the past” when Palestinian homes were destroyed, said university student Sufian Jarada, 23. “They should have left a long time ago.”
As the evacuation process was completed in the Gaza settlement, hundreds of soldiers flew in helicopters from Gaza to the northern West Bank where they are to take part in the evacuation of two hard-line settlements.
— Additional input from agencies
