Israel completes planned settlement pull-out

Israel completed a withdrawal of 15,000 Jewish settlers and supporters from occupied land yesterday after police ejected ultranationalist protesters making last stands in two West Bank enclaves.

Predictions of long, tough resistance to evacuation proved wrong just as they did in Gaza where troops cleared out settlers from all 21 enclaves two weeks ahead of schedule in a move to "disengage" from conflict with Palestinians.

US President George W. Bush, speaking after the last two settlements were evacuated, called for a return to the internationally sponsored peace "road map" that envisages the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside a secure Israel.

"But I understand that in order for this process to go forward there must be confidence: confidence that the Palestinian people would have in their own government to perform; the confidence with the Israelis that they'll see a peaceful state emerging," Bush said in Donnelly, Idaho.

The two sides now face the challenge of translating Israel's first dismantling of settlements on land that Palestinians want for a future state into fresh Middle East peace efforts after years of bloody stalemate.

Police stormed a citadel and synagogues in the Sanur and Homesh enclaves fortified by some 1,000 radicals, drawing a hail of bottles, light bulbs, paint, ketchup, eggs, tomatoes, cooking oil and flour in their effort to extract diehard settlers.

Some were plucked from a synagogue roof in the scoop of one of the bulldozers that had rammed through barriers of burning tyres and rubbish at the gates to neighbouring Sanur and Homesh.

There was a brief melee on one Homesh house roof after police, holding up shields to deflect projectiles hurled by youths, scaled ladders and scrambled over a razor-wire barricade to tackle the recalcitrant protesters.

As the operation was declared complete, police grabbed last holdouts on the roof of an old citadel and pushed them kicking and screaming into a shipping container that was then lowered by crane to a waiting bus.

Israel's army chief, Lieutenant-General Dan Halutz, said demolitions of vacant settler homes would be finished in 10 days and a follow-up military pull-out from Gaza "will be accomplished during September... I believe close to the end of September".

All of Gaza would then come under Palestinian rule. Israel plans to retain security control in the northern West Bank.

US-led diplomats count on Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's "disengagement plan" to kickstart a "road map" peace plan for a Palestinian state in the West Bank and in Gaza, where evacuations of settlers wrapped up on Monday.

Palestinians want Israel to hand over all of the two lands and Arab East Jerusalem for their capital. But Mr Sharon has vowed to keep all of Jerusalem and large West Bank settlements where some 230,000 Jews live among 2.4 million Palestinians. Polls show a majority of Israelis favour Mr Sharon's strategy.

But ultrarightists tried to make the withdrawal from a pocket of the northern West Bank more painful than the generally smooth evacuation from Gaza to deter Israel from ever again ceding settlements on land taken in the 1967 Middle East war.

Hundreds of radical teenagers had slipped into Sanur and Homesh from other West Bank settlements to bolster a few dozen leftover residents holding out against evacuation.

But thousands of troops and police needed only hours to overwhelm resistance and there was little full-blown violence.

Security forces dispensed with patient negotiations used in Gaza, swiftly rooting out radicals barricaded in three synagogues, a seminary, the citadel and houses by breaking in with circular saws, pile-drivers, sledgehammers and ladders.