Israeli forces smashed their way into two West Bank settlements yesterday and dragged away ultrarightist Jews dug in for a last stand against evacuation after failing to foil a pullout from occupied Gaza.
Police stormed a citadel and synagogues in the Sanur and Homesh enclaves that had been fortified by radicals, drawing a hail of bottles, light bulbs, paint, ketchup, eggs and cooking oil as they began extracting diehard settlers.
Some were plucked from a synagogue roof in the scoop of one of the bulldozers that had rammed through barriers of burning tires and rubbish at the gates to Sanur and neighboring Homesh.
PHOTO: AP
Palestinians want Israel to leave all of the West Bank and Gaza but Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has sworn to keep the biggest Jewish settlements in the West Bank, where some 230,000 settlers live among 2.4 million Palestinians.
Ultranationalists want to make the withdrawal from a pocket of the northern West Bank more painful than the generally smooth evacuation from Gaza, completed on Monday, to deter Israel from ever again ceding Jewish enclaves in occupied territory.
In the face of threatened violent resistance in barricaded redoubts, security forces dispensed with extended negotiations used in Gaza and moved swiftly on radicals hunkered down in three synagogues, a seminary, an old citadel and private homes.
The young ultranationalists had streamed into the two enclaves from other West Bank settlements to bolster a few dozen remaining residents holding out against evacuation.
"You cannot force us out of the land of Israel," one settler mother screamed at soldiers arriving at her door.
After brief attempts to coax out occupants, police equipped with riot batons and shields broke easily into houses and used saws, pile-drivers and sledgehammers to batter their way into two fortified synagogues and a seminary.
They found praying youths prone on the floor, arms entwined, and wrestled to separate them and haul them out to buses.
After surrounding Sanur's citadel, they bashed down the door to take on far-right religious teenagers armed with iron rods and shields, some of them dancing on its roof. A rabbi was negotiating with them to leave peacefully.
But resident settlers in both enclaves began vacating their homes without violence, walking in resignation to evacuation buses. Others, mounting passive resistance, were carried out.
By midday, about 330 radicals had been removed from 19 buildings in Sanur and Homesh, an army spokesman said.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas phoned Sharon to say he hoped the pullout would open a new chapter in relations and the two agreed to meet soon, Sharon's office said. The two last met on June 21 at a tense summit.
Unlike in Gaza, which Israel plans to hand over to Palestinians in October, the Jewish state plans to retain security control of the West Bank after the pullout there.
STEPPING UP: Diminished US polar science presence mean opportunities for the UK and other countries, although China or Russia might also fill that gap, a researcher said The UK’s flagship polar research vessel is to head to Antarctica next week to help advance dozens of climate change-linked science projects, as Western nations spearhead studies there while the US withdraws. The RRS Sir David Attenborough, a state-of-the-art ship named after the renowned British naturalist, would aid research on everything from “hunting underwater tsunamis” to tracking glacier melt and whale populations. Operated by the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), the country’s polar research institute, the 15,000-tonne icebreaker — boasting a helipad, and various laboratories and gadgetry — is pivotal to the UK’s efforts to assess climate change’s impact there. “The saying goes
Floods on Sunday trapped people in vehicles and homes in Spain as torrential rain drenched the northeastern Catalonia region, a day after downpours unleashed travel chaos on the Mediterranean island of Ibiza. Local media shared videos of roaring torrents of brown water tearing through streets and submerging vehicles. National weather agency AEMET decreed the highest red alert in the province of Tarragona, warning of 180mm of rain in 12 hours in the Ebro River delta. Catalan fire service spokesman Oriol Corbella told reporters people had been caught by surprise, with people trapped “inside vehicles, in buildings, on ground floors.” Santa Barbara Mayor Josep Lluis
Police in China detained dozens of pastors of one of its largest underground churches over the weekend, a church spokesperson and relatives said, in the biggest crackdown on Christians since 2018. The detentions, which come amid renewed China-US tensions after Beijing dramatically expanded rare earth export controls last week, drew condemnation from US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who on Sunday called for the immediate release of the pastors. Pastor Jin Mingri (金明日), founder of Zion Church, an unofficial “house church” not sanctioned by the Chinese government, was detained at his home in the southern city of Beihai on Friday evening, said
SANCTIONS: Congolese Minister of Foreign Affairs Therese Kayikwamba Wagner called on the EU to tighten sanctions against Rwanda during an event in Brussels The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo) has accused the EU of “an obvious double standard” for maintaining a minerals deal with Rwanda to supply Europe’s high-tech industries when it deployed a far-wider sanctions regime in response to the war in Ukraine. Congolese Minister of Foreign Affairs Therese Kayikwamba Wagner urged the EU to levy much stronger sanctions against Rwanda, which has fueled the conflict in the eastern DR Congo, describing the bloc’s response to breaches of the DR Congo’s territory as “very timid.” Referencing the EU’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, she said: “It is an obvious double standard
RSS