NEVE DEKALIM, Gaza Strip, Aug. 17 -- Israeli soldiers moved from house to house early Wednesday in an emotional final attempt to compel anguished residents of this Jewish settlement to leave their homes voluntarily after a grace period expired.
In long columns, soldiers marched into Neve Dekalim's quiet streets a few hours before the midnight deadline for all Israelis inside the Gaza Strip to leave. The troops were shadowed along the way by angry groups of young men and women, many of them settlers from the West Bank who had come here in recent weeks to strengthen resistance to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's order to evacuate Gaza's 21 Jewish settlements.
Working with maps and flashlights here in the strip's largest settlement, army officers went door to door asking families if they intended to leave their homes. The answer, more often than not, was no.
Shortly after sunrise, Israeli police began moving through this settlement's front gate, and columns of Army troops took up positions around its perimeter, preparing to move inside to begin removing settlers by force.
Every front lawn became a stage, illuminated by streetlights and open windows revealing that very few residents had packed up their belongings. When residents were called on to gather in the community's largest synagogue in the hours after the deadline to avoid arrest, only a fraction appeared to do so.
Groups of young women read psalms as soldiers approached house No. 339 on one nameless street. A few doors down, Chaim Bachar, a bearded farmer perspiring in the evening heat, warned groups of soldiers handpicked for the unusual assignment of removing Jews from their homes that they would always regret participating in this operation.
"We won't forgive and we won't forget," Bachar, his fist waving, shouted at the soldiers, some of whom wept openly over the course of the emotional few hours. "What will you tell your children, where you were this night? What will you tell your wife? That you were expelling Jews from their homes?"
The confrontations in the pre-dawn darkness marked the start of the operation's decisive and most challenging phase. Israeli troops must now move against a strident, well-organized resistance confident that it may still be able to force the government to cancel the withdrawal.
Israeli officials said Tuesday night that more than 800 of the Gaza settlements' roughly 1,500 families remained in their fortified communities, built on land envisioned as part of a future Palestinian state. Of the 21 settlements, only the three in the north, whose residents moved there largely for economic reasons, have emptied on their own.
In a later stage, soldiers will also evacuate four small Jewish settlements in the northern West Bank. Two of those communities have already been abandoned.
The number of settlers remaining in Gaza did not include the thousands of their mostly young West Bank counterparts who came to block the withdrawal from land occupied since the 1967 Middle East war -- territory that many Jews believe was promised to them by God. Israel's politically powerful settlers movement is also hoping to show Sharon, once a champion of the cause, that no more withdrawals should follow.
Israeli police say the fervor of the West Bank settlers, some of whom have resorted to vandalism and low-grade sabotage in demonstrations, has frightened many residents into defying eviction orders.
Gaza Withdrawal Begins