Israel Orders Troops Out of Palestinian Camp

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon late Thursday ordered a troop pullout from the Jabaliya refugee camp, defense officials said, after a two-week offensive in the northern Gaza Strip that has left 105 Palestinians dead.

However, officials said the army would react quickly if Palestinian militants resumed firing rockets at Israeli towns. Israel’s largest Gaza operation in four years of fighting began after a Palestinian rocket attack killed two Israeli children Sept. 29.

Army Radio said the Israelis were leaving with new capabilities to spot and hit militants launching rockets, an apparent reference to drone aircraft.

The pullout order came hours after Sharon announced that the 8,000 Jewish settlers in Gaza would be evacuated starting next summer in an operation to be completed within 12 weeks despite opposition from settlers and their supporters.

After nightfall Thursday, settlers demonstrated across Israel against the evacuation. Several thousand of them gathered near Sharon’s Jerusalem residence.

In the Palestinian village of Beit Lahiya, Israeli tanks and bulldozers pulled back early Thursday after tearing up roads, flattening greenhouses and knocking down dozens of houses. Five Palestinian militants and an elderly civilian were killed in three missile strikes, starting Wednesday evening.

Sharon told a closed session of the parliamentary Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that one of the objectives of the military campaign was to ensure quiet during next year’s “unilateral disengagement” from the Palestinians, which includes evacuation of all 21 Jewish settlements in Gaza and four in the northern West Bank.

However, Sharon said he was not linking the withdrawal to a halt in attacks by Palestinian militants.

Sharon has said withdrawing from Gaza would boost Israel’s security and help it hold on to chunks of the West Bank in a final peace deal.