10,000 Demonstrators Try to March to Gaza
About 17,000 Israeli police officers Wednesday blocked an estimated 10,000 Jewish settlers and sympathizers from marching to a settlement in the Gaza Strip to protest the Israeli plan to withdraw from the territory.
Both sides vowed to avoid violence in the confrontation on the road to the Gaza border from this southern Israeli town.
Many of the ultranationalist marchers, bearing the orange standard of the main Gaza settlement block, Gush Katif, sat on the road and chanted as security forces watched.
The Jewish state is deeply divided over Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s plan to withdraw from Gaza and a corner of the West Bank beginning Aug. 17. The pullout will affect 9,000 settlers.
Polls show a narrow majority of Israelis support the evacuation, but many rightists denounce it as a betrayal of Jewish claims on biblical land and a reward for the nearly 5-year-old Palestinian uprising.
The protest may be the last attempt to foil the removal of all 21 settlements in Gaza and four of 120 in the West Bank. If carried out, it will be the first such evacuation from land that Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East War and that Palestinians want for a state.
Sharon says Israel has no chance of keeping Gaza, where 8,500 settlers live sealed off from 1.4 million Palestinians, in a future peace deal. Palestinians suspect he intends to quit Gaza while cementing Israel’s hold on most of the West Bank.
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