Israeli troops on Wednesday fired in the air to quell clashes between Palestinians and far-right Jews who seized a new outpost in Gaza to obstruct Israel's planned withdrawal from the occupied territory. In Israel, police used water cannon to scatter Jewish ultra-nationalists with children sitting on the main highway entering Jerusalem as part of an effort by anti-pullout protesters to block traffic around the country.
The violence in Gaza, whose 8,500 Jewish settlers the government plans to evacuate, erupted as soldiers swept in to arrest nine Jewish settler youths for earlier stone-throwing assaults on Palestinian inhabitants.
Four Palestinians were injured, one a teenager felled by a rock thrown from close range by a settler, along with one settler and one soldier in the clash in the Palestinian district of al-Mawasi adjoining the Gush Katif settlement.
A soldier crouched to shield the seriously hurt Palestinian teenager from a settler crowd nearby, but there was no move to detain his attacker. The young Palestinian was later taken by ambulance to Khan Younis in Palestinian-administered Gaza.
The nine arrested youths, part of a recent influx into Gush Katif of hard-line settlers from the West Bank, were dragged by soldiers kicking and screaming from the three-storey building.
"Mohammed is a pig," read graffiti daubed by Jewish squatters on a house wall. A yellow flag of the outlawed anti-Arab group Kach waved from its roof.
Ultra-nationalists grabbed two vacant houses in al-Mawasi after scuffling with soldiers on Sunday in a failed bid to prevent them razing other empty housing that rightists intended to refurbish as bastions of resistance to the evacuation.
They are part of a spiralling campaign against Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's move to scrap all 21 Jewish enclaves in Gaza and four in the northern West Bank starting in mid-August to "disengage" from conflict with the Palestinians.
Aside from the Jerusalem area, rightists stopped traffic in Tel Aviv, at intersections in central Israel and near the northern city of Safed. Police moved in to wrestle aside the religious protesters, who were shouting "Jews don't expel Jews!"
Earlier, anti-pullout activists placed spikes and oil on a major Israeli highway, snarling traffic, slashing tyres of at least 20 cars and raising fears of a sabotage campaign to scuttle the withdrawal.
Comments
Comments are closed.