Israeli troops lift siege of Rafah neighbourhood

Palestinians hurl stones at an Israeli army vehicle during clashes at the Balata refugee camp south of the West Bank town of Nablus yesterday. A Palestinian teenager was killed in the clashes with Israeli troops, Palestinian medical sources said. PHOTO: AFP

Residents of Rafah's Tel Sultan district ventured onto the streets as Israeli tanks rumbled out of the area. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon pledged to put a revised plan to evacuate Jewish settlements in Gaza to a cabinet vote by next week.

Egypt's Intelligence Chief Omar Suleiman was due to hold talks with Palestinians later on Monday about Sharon's plan.

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An Israeli military source said the pullout was part of a "new deployment" to "ease conditions" and allow residents to leave their homes to stock up on food, water and medicine.

"It looks like an earthquake hit the neighborhood," said resident Sami Fuja. "The roads are completely torn up, thousands of greenhouses were razed and many houses damaged."

But Israeli troops remained in at least one other Rafah stronghold, known as the Brazil camp, where besieged residents reported a severe water shortage.

Yousef al-Nala, father of six, had only one bottle of water left. "Whenever one of the children says he wants water, I dribble a few drops into his mouth," said al-Nala.

Television footage of Palestinian refugees picking through the rubble of some 35 demolished homes in Rafah sparked a world outcry and even a row inside Sharon's cabinet.

Justice Minister Yosef Lapid, a Holocaust survivor, touched a raw nerve by saying the sight of an elderly Palestinian woman searching through the rubble of her home reminded him of his grandmother who died in a Nazi death camp.

He urged the cabinet to halt the demolitions and said further wreckage could force his centrist party to reconsider its participation in Sharon's government.

Sharon said on Sunday he was determined to push through a step-by-step plan to withdraw from Gaza and several West Bank Jewish settlements despite his right-wing Likud party's rejection of the pullout in a May 2 referendum.

AFP adds: The Islamist movement Hamas lambasted Arab countries yesterday for failing to prevent what it described as a "genocide" perpetrated by the Israeli army against the Palestinians in the southern Gaza Strip town of Rafah.

"What happened in Rafah is a genocide, an operation planned to avenge the deaths of Israeli soldiers killed in Zeitun and Rafah," the group said in a statement received by AFP here.

Hamas was referring to the killing of 13 soldiers in separate attacks by the Islamic Jihad group two weeks ago, which prompted Israel to launch the Intifada's largest operation in the Gaza Strip, leaving 43 Palestinians dead since last week.