Human Chain Protests Gaza Pullout Plan

Joining hands and political aims, tens of thousands of Israelis formed a 55-mile human chain Sunday from the Gaza Strip to Jerusalem to protest Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s plan to remove Jewish settlements from Gaza and parts of the West Bank.

The cordon stretched more or less continuously from the Nisanit settlement at the northern edge of the coastal strip to the Western Wall, the Jewish prayer site inside Jerusalem’s walled Old City.

“You cannot expel Jews from their houses, houses they’ve lived in for three generations already, houses where they’ve raised their children,” Shimon Levy, 60, said.

Levy stood with his wife along a stretch of downtown Jerusalem where protesters were packed as tightly as if they had come for a parade. “It’s impossible to transfer the homes of Jews and give them to somebody else,” he said.

The demonstration was among actions planned by opponents who hope to derail Sharon’s proposal, which calls for the removal of all 21 settlements in Gaza and four in the northern West Bank by the end of next year.

Sharon’s Cabinet has approved the plan in principle. But the evacuations and related arrangements, such as compensating homeowners, will require separate government action, giving opponents a chance to mobilize.

About 7,500 Israelis live in the Gaza Strip, mostly in a block of settlements known as Gush Katif. A few hundred live in the four settlements targeted for evacuation in the West Bank.

Most Israeli polls show support for the pullout, but Gush Katif activists said they hoped Sunday’s demonstration would display opposition from across the country. Organizers rented more than 800 buses to shuttle protesters to designated spots along the route.

Activists said it would take at least 100,000 people to complete the chain. Police estimated that 130,000 took part, according to Israeli media.

“The human chain is here to tell the prime minister that the people of Israel are with Gush Katif, and the people of Gush Katif are one with Israel,” said Rachel Saperstein, a spokeswoman for the Katif Regional Council who lives in Neve Dekalim, one of the Gaza settlements to be evacuated.

Sharon has said that pulling out of Gaza would reduce tensions with the Palestinians and relieve the Israeli army of the need to defend the Jewish residents, who live among 1.3 million Palestinians.

Palestinian militants fired a homemade Kassam rocket into a community center in Neve Dekalim on Sunday evening, wounding six children, news reports said.

The protest stretched over Israeli highways from the coastal plain in Gaza Strip to the streets of Jerusalem, perched atop a ridge in the country’s interior. There were a few gaps because police required that some major junctions and highway stretches remain open to traffic.

Saperstein said participants were instructed to avoid confrontations.

“This is a nonviolent event by the silent majority,” she said.

Israeli officials have said in recent weeks that Jewish extremists might resort to violence to prevent the withdrawal.

Tzachi Hanegbi, the Israeli public safety minister, said Saturday that officials were concerned that extremists would target Muslim holy sites inside the Old City to trigger a chain reaction of violence that would block any move by Israel to leave Gaza.

Hanegbi said that government officials had no specific suspects, but that there was “a wealth of very worrying indications that there is concrete thinking in this area, and not only thinking on a philosophical level.”

The Haaretz newspaper reported Sunday that security officials feared that Jewish militants might seek to crash an airplane or an unmanned drone loaded with explosives into the hilltop complex in Jerusalem known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as Haram al Sharif, or “noble sanctuary.”

The site is holy to both faiths and has been a hot spot for violence. Officials fear that such an attack could kill or injure many Muslims who gather at the mosque complex and invite a severe counterattack by Palestinian militants that would halt efforts to remove the settlements, the newspaper said.

Officials recently tightened security around Sharon amid concerns that Jewish extremists might try to assassinate a key government leader.

Foes of the pullout have assailed the government’s warnings of possible attacks by Jewish extremists as baseless and counterproductive, saying they were worried that authorities might use such charges to muzzle legitimate opposition to the withdrawal.

In other developments, six armed Palestinians were reportedly killed Sunday night in a clash with Israeli forces in the northern West Bank town of Tulkarm.

An Israeli army spokeswoman said one of the gunmen was a local commander of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade who had been involved in attacks on Israelis. No other details were immediately available.

Two Palestinians were reported to have been slightly injured when an Israeli helicopter fired two missiles in the northern Gaza Strip on Sunday.

The Israeli army said the strike was aimed at a suspected weapons factory housed in a residential building and that the missiles were on target.

A second missile strike later Sunday targeted the same building.