Israel will use its imminent withdrawal from the Gaza Strip after a nearly 40-year occupation to strengthen control over strategic nerve centres such as Jerusalem, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said Thursday. The blueprint to "disengage" from Gaza and four settlements in the West Bank has incited tremendous opposition among settlers and nationalists, despite Sharon's insistence that he will tighten Israel's grip elsewhere.
"It amounts to a decision to leave an area of less security importance in order to strengthen those with a high strategic value for us," he said.
"The disengagement plan cannot be summed up just as leaving Gaza. It also invests big efforts in developing the Galilee, the Negev and greater Jerusalem," Sharon told a development forum in northern Israel.
Although Israel considers Jerusalem its undivided capital, the international community refuses to recognise it as such. Palestinians claim east Jerusalem, which Israel conquered in 1967, as the capital of their future state.
Preparations for the withdrawal took a step closer Thursday as the first batch of hundreds of mobile homes for Gaza settlers were installed near the Mediterranean coast in southern Israel.