Analysis: Israel Officials Hope to Speed Gaza Withdrawl

Morning Edition:August 16, 2005

STEVE INSKEEP, host:

This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News. Renee Montagne is away. I'm Steve Inskeep.

Midnight tonight, Israeli time, is the deadline for Israeli settlers to leave their homes in Gaza forever. They're also supposed to leave four settlements in the West Bank. After that, teams of police and soldiers will go house to house and forcibly remove anyone who's resisting, and that will end Israel's nearly four-decade occupation of the Gaza Strip. Hundreds of families have already packed up and left, although resistance continues at a few places. NPR's Linda Gradstein has been moving about the Gaza Strip, and joins us now from the settlement of Gadid.

And, Linda, what are you seeing and hearing today?

LINDA GRADSTEIN reporting:

Well, in the settlement of Gadid, where I am, soldiers came in, in the morning, without resistance, they went door to door, and they asked people if they needed help packing. I did overhear a few arguments between the soldiers and the settlers, with one settler yelling at the soldiers, `Where have you been for the last five years when the Palestinians were attacking us? Now you're coming here to take me out of my house.'

But, overall, the exchanges were civil. I've been sort of following one family through this, and when the soldiers came, he actually started to cry. He was one of the founders of the Gadid settlement, where I am right now, and--but, then, within a few minutes, he brought out cake for the soldiers and they helped him dismantle his air conditioner.

However, in the nearby settlement N'vei Dekalim, the picture was very different. Several hundred young people, mostly people from outside Gaza, who have infiltrated in recent weeks, tried to block the main gate of the settlement. It was a similar scene that we saw yesterday, and this time, as opposed to yesterday, when the soldiers eventually went away, this time they broke down the main gate of the settlement. It's a large metal gate, a yellow--long metal gate. They took it away, and then several hundred police and soldiers came in and lined up on the road in order to allow moving trucks to come in so that families who do want to leave by the deadline will be able to.

INSKEEP: So in the place where you are, generally, civil situation, with some civil disobedience. How does this change after midnight, the deadline?

GRADSTEIN: Well, after midnight, things change completely because it then becomes illegal for anyone to be in Gaza, and the Israeli defense minister says that law and order will be imposed, they will begin going house to house, taking people out. Now there are two kinds of people who are refusing to leave. One group says, `We will not leave voluntarily. We will wait for the soldiers, but when the soldiers come, we will either walk out ourselves or we will let them carry us out but we will not resist.' There is another group of several thousand young people who say, `We will do everything we can to resist,' and it's these younger people who've already attacked some army Jeeps. Today, they attacked some moving trucks. They've put nails on the road to try to puncture the tires. And it's this group of people that the army and police are most concerned about.

INSKEEP: Linda, we mentioned that Israeli authorities want to evacuate all the settlements in Gaza and four of the many settlements in the West Bank. What happens to the other settlements in the West Bank?

GRADSTEIN: Well, that's the question. I mean, what some of the people here say is that we know that, you know, Gaza--it's too late now for Gaza but we see this struggle as, you know, the struggle over the West Bank, and they say that they want to show the Israeli public that it's going to be so difficult to evacuate Gaza, which has only about 9,000 Jewish settlers, you know, to make sure that the West Bank can never be evacuated. Palestinians, of course, say that this is the first step, and must be the first step, to a complete Israeli withdrawal to the borders before 1967. And so really nobody knows what's going to happen to those settlers. Sharon has been saying repeatedly that Israel will never withdraw to the 1967 lines, but it's not clear if this is the beginning of the process or the end of a process.

INSKEEP: Referring to Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister. That's NPR's Linda Gradstein in Gadid, a settlement in the Gaza Strip.

Linda, we'll continue listening. Thanks very much.

GRADSTEIN: Thank you, Steve.

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