Israeli soldiers sawed down and pried open doors as they forced their way into a nursery filled with Jewish ultranationalists opposed to the Gaza pull-out on Thursday, dragging parents holding screaming children out of the building.
One woman briefly forced the soldiers out of the building in the Kfar Darom settlement when she waved a needle she said was infected with the HIV/Aids virus and threatened to stab soldiers trying to remove her from the nursery.
”Get out, get out. If anybody comes near me I will start acting,” the woman shouted.
About two dozen soldiers immediately cleared out of the room, and special forces were brought in.
A few minutes later the woman walked out of the building with a medic and several soldiers next to her. Soldiers then rushed back into the building and began dragging out the last of the settlers.
Soldiers said the half dozen families with more than 20 children holed-up inside of the nursery were all ultra-nationalists who had come to the settlement to protest the withdrawal.
”We wanted to help in the battle,” said Chavi Healer (26) who came to Gaza from central Israel with her husband and two small children — an 18-month old girl and a three-and-a-half-year-old boy.
”We will stay as long as possible,” Healer said, adding that she would leave in the end and not force soldiers to drag her from the room because she is pregnant.
”This is a terrible tragedy and something that can’t be understood,” she said.
”It is unbelievable that the state of Israel has reached this point. They would not do this to Arabs.”
After she spoke, soldiers dragged a man out of the room, while a crying woman with an infant in her arms left in tears. One husband and wife locked themselves into a bathroom with their infant child.
Soldiers pried open the door and forced the couple out.
The man then took out a prayer shawl and asked the soldiers to join him in a brief prayer. After praying, the man made a tear in his shirt and his wife’s shirt — a sign of mourning — and laid down on the floor with his crying child on top of him. The soldiers then dragged the man from the building.
‘Take up your positions’
Meanwhile, behind locked doors, the residents of the Shirat Hayam settlement on Thursday sought refuge in music as youths who have joined the struggle against expulsion took up defensive positions on rooftops and in sand dunes.
The long-awaited entry of hundreds of Israeli soldiers into the most hardline of all the Gaza settlements was the cue for its residents and their guests to play their long-rehearsed roles.
”Take up your positions” said a curt message on a loudspeaker, sending scores of young activists scuttling to their places.
Residents mostly went to their own homes and locked the doors behind them, seemingly leaving troops with no option but to smash their way inside.
One man could be heard hammering away at a piano from inside his home while others sang traditional Jewish laments as gunboats loomed off the coast of the Mediterranean bastion of opposition to the government’s disengagement plan.
”We will cry and God will hear us,” went the lyrics of one of the songs.
Youths gathered at the front gates began hurling rotten eggs, empty tins of food and even light bulbs at security forces who had come to haul them away.
”You should be ashamed of yourselves. This is a crime,” shouted one of the youngsters at the column of soldiers who were approaching the front barricades.
Many activists hurried to positions in sand dune bunkers, looking out onto the calm waters of the Mediterranean.
Others headed to rooftops, including that of the local synagogue which has already been wrapped in barbed wire ahead of the inevitable showdown.
Menahem was one of those heading straight to the synagogue which has served this 40-strong community since it was set up five years ago.
”They will have to force us to leave the synagogue,” he said while stressing that he did not advocate the use of violence against soldiers.
”We’ll slash the tyres of cars because cars are not human, but we will not hurt our soldiers,” added the teenager who normally lives in the Gush Etzion settlement bloc in the occupied West Bank.
”You are the most evil people in the world. Just wait until you guys are a minority. We will show you what it’s like to be removed,” said one man pushing his baby from east Jerusalem who gave his name only as Rehavia.
Several hundred activists have massed in Shirat Hayam in recent weeks, establishing a tent-city on the beach and taking over abandoned huts once used by Egyptian officers before the territory’s capture by Israel in 1967.
Shortly before the arrival of the troops on the road through the settlement, a group of radicals managed to take control of the watchtower which had been the base for troops protecting Shirat Hayam from their Palestinian neighbours.
A group barged the platoon out of the way, knocking a female soldier to the ground. One of her colleagues was so incensed that he had to be restrained from lashing out by his superior officer.
Palestinians living in the neighbouring enclave of Mawassi also took to the rooftops to secure a bird’s eye view of events next door.
Four men with guns were among 20 Gaza pull-out opponents standing on a rooftop in the settlement, and security forces were sending in negotiators to try to find out what they wanted, said police spokesperson Shai Itzkovitz.
Soldiers began dragging people out of a seaside home. It took six soldiers to carry out one squirming man.
Shirat Hayam, on the Mediterranean beach, is home to about 20 families, but has been reinforced in recent weeks by hundreds of ultranationalist protesters.
The army sent in a bulldozer to douse flames raging from a barricade at the entrance. When the bulldozer arrived, settlers threw balloons with red and white paint at it.
Girls chained themselves together to resist the eviction. A group of settlers sat on a rooftop singing, playing the guitar and banging drums, with the blue Mediterranean in the background.
Young people guarded the entrances to dozens of tents pitched on the beach to house protesters from outside Gaza.
Settlers shouted at soldiers, urging them not to take part in the demolition of Jewish homes in the Israel. Shirat Hayam’s residents are fervently religious Jews who believe that evacuating Gaza is a betrayal of God’s biblical promise to the
Jews.
Solemn prayers boomed from the settlement’s loudspeakers. – Sapa-AP