Settlers Clash With Troops Dismantling Outpost

JERUSALEM â€”  Jewish settlers clung to a rocky West Bank hillside, exchanging blows, shoves and angry words Thursday with Israeli soldiers who were deployed for the first time to evacuate a populated settlement outpost as part of Israel’s obligations under an American-backed peace plan.

The daylong confrontation under a hot sun occurred on the eve of a visit by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, which is aimed at shoring up the troubled peace plan. It left dozens injured and at least 20 settlers under arrest -- even though both sides tried to keep the confrontation from spinning out of control.

In televised scenes that sent a ripple of distress through Israel, the battle pitted Israeli against Israeli and brother against brother -- literally, in one instance.

One of the several hundred radical young settlers resisting the removal of a scattering of tents and a ramshackle building from a hillside dubbed Mitzpe Yitzhar, an offshoot of the nearby Jewish settlement of Yitzhar, greeted his soldier brother, who arrived as part of the army contingent charged with clearing the area. Then the two went back to their respective battle lines.

While troops and settlers engaged in their struggle over the remote hilltop in the northern West Bank, Israelis mourned the latest victim of a Palestinian suicide bombing -- a shopkeeper and father of six who died when the bomber blew himself up early Thursday in a grocery store in the Israeli farming community of Sde Trumot near the boundary with the northern West Bank.

The death of Avner Mordechai, 63, triggered an anguished appeal from his son, Dror. The bomber was identified as a Palestinian teenager from the nearby West Bank village of Yanoun, dispatched on his mission by the Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad.

“Take a good look at my mother,� the younger Mordechai said on Israel Radio, addressing the bomber’s mother. “You lost your son, my mother lost her husband, we lost our father.... How long can we continue this way? All this blood, suffering -- it is too much.�

In advance of Powell’s scheduled visit to Jerusalem for talks with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and to the West Bank city of Jericho to meet with Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, discussions have been taking place in recent days between Israelis and the Palestinians, and between the Palestinian Authority government and Palestinian militant groups. No breakthroughs have been reported.

Israeli and Palestinian security officials have been trying to come up with a formula under which the Palestinians would assume responsibility for policing a violence-prone swath of the northern Gaza Strip, and Israeli troops would pull back from the area. Palestinian militant groups including Hamas have used northern Gaza as a staging ground for firing homemade rockets toward Israeli towns.

Palestinian officials are worried that they will be handed the responsibility for keeping order in northern Gaza and then find themselves unable to halt the rocket attacks -- which have continued throughout an extended Israeli military clampdown in the area.

Complicating any security hand-over in northern Gaza was last week’s string of Israeli missile strikes at Hamas targets in Gaza, part of a spate of violence between Israelis and Palestinians. The Israeli attacks killed six Hamas operatives, wounded senior leader Abdulaziz Rantisi and destroyed a storehouse that Israel said was used for the group’s crude Kassam rockets.

Abbas, widely known as Abu Mazen, has been trying to secure a temporary cease-fire with the militant armed factions. Palestinian officials and Israeli media reports say he has made an overture to the militant groups, offering them a voice in his government. No details have been released, and there has been no direct response from Hamas. However, Hamas and the other militant groups are seeking assurances that the wave of Israeli assassinations will stop, at least for the time being. Israel has been unwilling to make such a guarantee.

The day’s violence at Mitzpe Yitzhar, the settlement outpost, continued until after nightfall, when troops finally secured the area and settled in for the night. Seeking to block the evacuation, the settlers -- many of them from a radical faction known as the “hilltop youth� -- burned tires, erected makeshift barriers and threw wild punches at the troops trying to drag them away.

Some of the settlers tried repeatedly to clamber atop an army armored personnel carrier and were wrestled off it by soldiers. The settlers, who included women, danced in circles and prayed aloud in between scuffles with the troops, raising clouds of pale dust and sometimes weeping with fury.

“Who cannot cringe at the [army] using APCs ... to evict Jews from their land?� asked a settler named Yehuda Lipner. “How can anyone not balk at the sight of Jewish brothers against Jews?�

During the melee, Palestinians from nearby villages tried to stay clear, but the violence spilled over into their fields and groves. A wheat field was torched and a stand of olive trees set ablaze, apparently by settlers, during the faceoff with soldiers.

It was clear, though, that neither side wanted the struggle to escalate beyond a certain point. Soldiers went armed only with knives that they used to cut the ropes securing settlers’ tents; the settlers, who usually go about armed with M-16 rifles and pistols, left their weapons at the nearby main settlement.

In an illustration of the chaotic yet highly choreographed nature of the encounter, a cry of “Medic!� would occasionally go up, and both sides would freeze in their combative postures while someone with a bloody nose or broken teeth was led away to a waiting ambulance.

The outpost evacuation was mandated under the peace plan, known as the “road map,� which calls for the dismantling of settlement offshoots set up after Sharon took power in 2001. The Israeli group Peace Now says there are dozens of such outposts, but the Israeli government has targeted only about a dozen inhabited ones for immediate removal, with Mitzpe Yitzhar being the first.

Ten uninhabited settlement offshoots -- consisting mainly of trailers, shipping containers and other makeshift structures -- were removed last week, but settlers quickly reclaimed five of those hilltops.

The fate of larger and more established Jewish settlements, some of them city-like entities with tens of thousands of residents, is to be decided later in the negotiating process. Many settlers fear that the dismantling of illegal outposts is the leading edge of what will be an eventual bid by the Sharon government to relinquish many mainstream settlements.

“If they take us down, we will go right back up,� said Arieh Eldad, a settler lawmaker from the hard-line National Union, one of the parties in Sharon’s governing coalition. “Experience shows that for every hilltop evacuated, four, five or 10 will sprout up instead. The army must understand this.� Yitzhar, the settlement closest to the outpost that was targeted Thursday, has long been known as a hotbed of settler militancy. Some of those living there were students at a controversial yeshiva, or Jewish seminary, at Joseph’s Tomb, a disputed shrine in the Palestinian city of Nablus that was the scene of fierce fighting earlier in the intifada, or Palestinian uprising.

The settlers sought to portray the day’s events as the herald of a coming fratricidal conflict brought on by Sharon’s decision to move ahead with the peace initiative, which envisions an eventual Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Nearly a quarter-million Jewish settlers live in the Palestinian territories, encouraged by previous Israeli governments to claim the land as their own.

On Thursday, the two brothers, identified in media reports only as Yossi and Moshe, met at the scene of the Mitzpe Yitzhar confrontation. Yossi was from a nearby settlement outpost, trying to block the soldiers; his brother was one of several hundred troops assigned to carry out the evacuation.

“I saw my brother, we greeted each other and embraced, and continued with our respective business,� Yossi told Israel Radio. “This is difficult for everyone.... This is a crazy situation.�