Israeli Forces Complete Settlement Evacuation

Holdouts in West Bank Overwhelmed

SANUR, West Bank, Aug. 23 -- Israeli police and soldiers swept aside resistance at two Jewish settlements in the West Bank on Tuesday in the final act of a historic withdrawal from 25 settlements the government maintained for decades as an expression of its vision of a Jewish state in land also claimed by Palestinians.

Coming just one day after the last of 21 settlements in the Gaza Strip was cleared, the swift closing of four remote settlements on the West Bank meant that in nine days, security forces accomplished a painful task that Israeli officials had warned could take weeks.

"Game over," an Israeli border policeman said with a tight smile, walking briskly away from the spectacular rooftop confrontation that ended resistance here in Sanur, a tiny enclave on a hillock in the middle of a valley dominated by Palestinian villages.

The final encounter involved a choreographed assault by riot police from a pair of shipping containers swaying from cranes and backed by tear gas and a fire hose.

Uniformed security forces overwhelmed the mostly young resistors who made a last stand down the road in Homesh, which, like Sanur, faced an overpowering force of 6,000 police officers and soldiers. Two other settlements, Ganim and Kadim, emptied without confrontation.

"The Israeli Defense Forces operated cleverly," said Amihoy Kinarki, 33, who like many of the protesters in the West Bank on Tuesday -- and in Gaza the previous week -- traveled from other settlements to confront security forces and embarrass Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. "They brought a mass of soldiers and policeman that was invincible. Against each one of us there was maybe 100.

"Our struggle was lost from the beginning. We had no chance."

The end came at 5:30 p.m. as specially trained battalions in Homesh carried the last of dozens of teenage girls from the upper story of a building they had torn the stairs from. It was a fitting conclusion in a confrontation played out in large part by angry young people, many born on settlements, who flocked to the closure sites with the certainty of youth.

One of them, a 9-year-old boy, prowled the roof of the stone public building that dominates Sanur. "You can't kick me out of here," shouted the child, Bnaya Neuman. Alluding to Sharon, he declared: "I'll live where I want to, not where that fat guy tells me to."

Since his initial proposal 18 months ago to "disengage" from Palestinians in Gaza and the northern end of the West Bank, Sharon has weathered intense opposition from within the settler movement that he once championed. Though polls indicated a majority of Israelis supported the Gaza pullout, large numbers of religious Jews opposed withdrawal from any part of the land they believe was promised to them by God in the Bible.

Tuesday's forced evacuations were carried out by the same battalions of specially trained police and soldiers who had done the heavy lifting in Gaza. Approaching on the well-paved roads that wind through the hills of the West Bank, the troops donned flak vests when their buses entered sections where Palestinian guerrillas were considered a threat.

At Sanur, they added helmets, several with new plastic face shields. Officers said that with outsiders pouring in for a last stand, they expected a confrontation more violent than at Kfar Darom, the Gaza settlement where protesters pelted them with paint and corrosive liquid.