Eviction Notices Are Served in Gaza

For the 2nd Company of the Shachar Battalion, the day that its soldiers had spent months training for started before dawn in the fog at a military base just outside the Gaza Strip. Only a few months ago, the army camp was a field of sunflowers.

The battalion's 450 troops were handpicked from the ranks of professional soldiers for the disengagement operation. But despite their experience, a nervous quiet marked the hours before they filed onto buses -- many of them unarmed, given the spirit of the day's operation -- for the trip to the settlements.

"You can't just have an 18-year-old soldier pulling people out of their houses," said Maj. Max Levy, 27, the battalion's operations officer. "These are people who have homes and know what that means."

Along the road, progress was halting, and the bus idled frequently as word passed over army radios that hundreds of demonstrators were blocking the way ahead. Some soldiers fidgeted with cell phones, others recited from pocket-size tehilim -- the book of psalms -- while they waited for the buses to move.

"Should I be doing this? I don't know, I really don't know," said Rami Marom, 30, a noncommissioned officer who lives in the West Bank settlement of Shaked and disagrees with the evacuation policy. People in his settlement tell him that he "shouldn't be here," he said, but "I tell them I am in the military, that I have to do my job."

During the pauses, Maj. Yitzhak Nachmani, the company commander, strolled up the aisles. Compact and ebullient, Nachmani patted each soldier on the shoulder, seeking to reassure even those experienced in battle but who had never before faced a Jewish adversary.

"How are you?" Nachmani asked Marom. "Okay?"

"Okay, okay," Marom replied.

At the back entrance to this settlement of three synagogues, a yeshiva, or Jewish religious academy, built in the shape of a Star of David and well-kept homes, dozens of army buses pulled up just after 10 a.m. Nachmani's company began walking toward a crowd at the gates.

The soldiers moved along a concrete wall separating the settlement from the crossing into Khan Younis. On a hilltop ahead, young men and women, singing in high voices, locked elbows in a human chain. The soldiers reached the barrier, which then closed around them. For nearly 20 minutes, soldiers and settlers mingled in the small enclave formed by the human chain and the wall.

The soldiers retreated and soon were scuffling in the road with a number of young men, several of whom punctured tires of an arriving army jeep seconds before being chased away. "All the boys you see here yelling -- they will be soldiers or already are soldiers," said Marilyn Adler, 44, who arrived here from the West Bank settlement of Efrat last month with four of her six children.

Adler and her 8-year-old son, Itai, watched as disengagement opponents confronted a line of soldiers only slightly older in most cases. One of the opponents screamed, "Nazi! Nazi!" in a soldier's face. Another doused the windshield of a jeep with dishwashing soap before being slammed to the ground by an Israeli police official.

"I think this could work, I really do," Adler said of the opposition. "We're very determined. We'll see if the government gives up first."

The scuffling followed the same dynamic as recent anti-disengagement rallies that have mixed street theater and low-grade guerrilla tactics. Chanting and singing gave way to periods of rest when soldiers and settlers, in small groups, chatted quietly. A young opponent with a megaphone warned demonstrators to drink water and seek shade.

Hours later, as Company 2 rode back to the base in silence, Marom reflected on the afternoon. He no longer had to imagine what confronting his fellow settlers would entail. But he worried about what the days ahead would bring.

"It's going to be bad," he said. "Really, it's going to be bad."

Special correspondents Samuel Sockol and Ian Deitch contributed to this report.