Version of Gaza pullout approved

By Ken Ellingwood
Los Angeles Times

BRENNAN LINSLEY / AP A Palestinian policeman tries to keep back prospective Palestinian workers yesterday at the Erez crossing on the Gaza-Israel border. The Palestinians were hoping to get to work in Israel.

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Sharon envisions removing all 21 Gaza Strip settlements and four others in the northern West Bank in stages by the end of next year. He said the pullback is in the best interest of Israeli security.

Under a last-minute compromise with holdout members of his Likud party, Sharon agreed to a revision stating that the government does not yet have permission to uproot settlements. The Cabinet would have to decide later which settlements would be dismantled — adequate time, foes hope, to blunt the plan.

Sharon plans to seek approval in March, after government preparations have been made. For now, the settlements can continue receiving government funding to pay for utilities and other municipal services but not to pay for new construction.

The compromise was aimed at heading off a damaging rift within the right-leaning Likud, Israel's dominant party, and at helping shore up Sharon's shaky governing coalition.

However, Sharon and settlement backers saw the vote as the beginning of the withdrawal.

"The disengagement is under way. Today the government decided that by the end of 2005, Israel intends to leave Gaza and four settlements in (the northern West Bank)," Sharon said. "The majority in Israel understands the immense importance of this decision."

Housing Minister Effie Eitam, who voted against the plan, said the bottom line of the vote was that Israel would dismantle the Gaza settlements. "No word laundry can bleach one of the blackest decisions ever taken by an Israeli government, which means expulsion of thousands of residents and the creation of a Hamas terror state," he said.

The Cabinet vote marks the first time Israel has unilaterally agreed to withdraw from areas it seized in the 1967 Middle East War, a development considered significant because Sharon was for decades the godfather of the settlement movement.

Palestinian leaders welcomed any Israeli withdrawal but expressed skepticism over whether the plan would be put into place. "If approving this fragmented plan took the Israeli government this long, I wonder how much time it will take to implement it," said Saeb Erekat, a Palestinian Cabinet member. "If President Bush isn't re-elected, I think this plan will go into history with other plans."

In related developments:

An Israeli court yesterday sentenced Palestinian revolt leader Marwan Barghouti to life in prison for murder, but the man seen as Yasser Arafat's possible successor said his people's statehood quest would not be broken.

"The (Israeli) occupation is going to end one day. It is dying," Barghouti, 45, said just before the Tel Aviv court handed down five consecutive life sentences for murder in the killings of five people by militants in his Fatah faction.

Israeli soldiers yesterday shot to death a man in a wheelchair who had been shot twice before in confrontations with troops, medics and witnesses in the West Bank said yesterday.

Arafat Yakoub, 31, was shot in the head when troops fired at stone-throwing demonstrators near a checkpoint at Kalandiya refugee camp, north of Jerusalem, medics said.

Residents of Kalandiya said Yakoub had been paralyzed when soldiers shot him in a 1989 confrontation and wounded again in 2002.