PEAT SADEH, Gaza Strip, Dec. 26 -- Residents of a small Jewish settlement here said Sunday that they had struck a deal to move to a village in Israel, giving a boost to the government's Gaza pullout plan by becoming the first community to agree to be evacuated.
Peat Sadeh, a tiny, upscale farming village tucked into the southwest corner of Gaza about a mile from the Mediterranean Sea, raised the ire of hard-line settler leaders, who are campaigning against Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan to remove all 21 settlements from Gaza and four from part of the West Bank next year.
Sharon's coalition government fell apart over his policy shift a year ago, forcing him to try to reconstitute his team with the Labor Party, his traditional rival.
Early this year, Sharon abruptly abandoned decades of work for settlement construction and expansion, calling Gaza settlements "untenable" because only 8,200 Israelis live there among more than 1 million Palestinians in the impoverished, crowded seaside territory.
Israelis, by contrast, have lived well in Gaza, but their settlements have been a sore point with the Palestinians. In recent years, mortar shells and rockets fired by militants in Gaza have rained down on them, and infiltration attempts have multiplied.
Yonatan Bassi, director of the government agency overseeing the Gaza pullout, said the evacuation deal with the residents of Peat Sadeh was reached last week. He said the settlement's 20 families, joined by five families from other settlements, would move to Mavkiim, a farming village near Ashkelon, beginning in March.
While the Peat Sadeh deal is the first under the government's withdrawal plan, Bassi said officials were negotiating with a "great number" of settlers willing to leave. He declined to give exact numbers.
A spokesman for Gaza settlers, Eran Sternberg, disputed Bassi's claim, saying the vast majority of settlers remained opposed to the pullout.
Also on Sunday, Sharon's cabinet approved measures meant to help the Jan. 9 Palestinian presidential election go smoothly.
"The Palestinian election is of the utmost importance in choosing a leadership that we hope we will be able to move forward with" in peace talks, Sharon told his ministers.
The package includes easing military restrictions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and allowing some campaign activities in disputed East Jerusalem. Just before the election, the military will pull out of all Palestinian population centers, according to Sunday's decision.
In another development, Israeli soldiers killed two Palestinians crawling toward the border fence near the Bureij refugee camp in Gaza, the military said. Palestinian security sources said the two were members of Hamas.
