The Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip had been declared a military zone, which allowed the Israeli army to deny access to Israeli citizens other than residents. They were thus able to exclude political opponents of the withdrawal from Gaza. Two new security fences, one with razor wire and the other with electronic sensors and surveillance cameras, were being installed that would completely surround the Gaza Strip. The Israeli soldiers also demolished a dozen unoccupied bungalows on the coast where a group of settlers from the West Bank had set up a protest camp.
On 18 July 2005, more than 20,000 Israelis came to demonstrate in southern Israel close to the Strip to declare their rejection of Ariel Sharon’s policy. The movement of solidarity with the Gaza settlers lost some of its impetus, however, when a Tsahal deserter killed four Israeli Arabs in Galilee on 4 August before being lynched by a mob. On 8 August 2005, the Gaza settlers were told that they had only a week left to depart voluntarily from the territory and thus to qualify for full compensation. After the deadline had expired, at midnight on 16 August, less than half of the 8,500 settlers remained.
On the other hand, those who refused to leave had been joined by a similar number of young settlers from the West Bank. When the Israeli forces moved in, however, there were only a few disturbances, despite the provocation offered to the Palestinians by the settlers of Kfar Darom and Neve Dekalim. Among the soldiers, only one case of refusal to obey orders was recorded, when two soldiers refused to clear the synagogue at Kfar Darom with water cannon on 18 August.
The same scenario was repeated from one settlement to the next. The settlers demolished or rendered unusable their residences and the agricultural greenhouses before handing their settlements over to Tsahal. This scorched-earth policy represented the failure of the plan James Wolfensohn had devised for the transfer of the greenhouses to the Palestinian Authority for which he had raised 14 million dollars from philanthropic sources, including half a million dollars of his own money. On 22 August 2005, the disengagement came to a conclusion with the evacuation of Netzarim. Sharon, who had been minister of defence in April 1982 at the time of the dismantling of the colony of Yamit in Sinai in accordance with the Israeli–Egyptian peace treaty, had this time brought to fruition an even more complex operation. The dramatic removal of the settlers in fact enhanced his international stature as a statesman who was ready if necessary to impose painful concessions on his own side. However, the Sharon government reneged on an earlier agreement to destroy the synagogues in the abandoned settlements, thus leaving the Palestinians to take responsibility for an act of sacrilege.
After the disappearance of the settlements, Tsahal continued to occupy its own positions in the Gaza Strip, from which it made occasional sorties. The countdown to the Israeli withdrawal had in the meantime exacerbated the internal feuds within Fatah. On 7 September 2005, 100 militiamen seized Musa Arafat’s residence, killing him on the spot and kidnapping his son Manhal, who was released the following day. This was a blow for Mahmoud Abbas, who had to cancel a scheduled visit to the UN General Assembly. The last Israeli units withdrew from the Gaza Strip shortly after dawn on 12 September. It immediately became clear that the Palestinian security forces were unable to halt the looting of what remained of the abandoned settlements. The Egyptian frontier guard was also swamped and simply opened the Rafah crossing point with unrestricted access.
These scenes of anarchy cast a shadow over the Palestinian Authority’s celebration of Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. On 13 September, Hamas organised a demonstration involving tens of thousands of its supporters in Gaza City to claim the withdrawal was a victory for the ‘resistance’. While Hamas was careful not to make a show of arms, Islamic Jihad, which attracted less support, went on parade with its full panoply of weapons. The appearance of the Palestinian security forces across the territory, however, particularly on the frontier with Egypt, brought about a rapid change in Hamas’s position. On 16 September, thousands of masked Hamas militants paraded with their weapons on the site of the former settlement of Neve Dekalim, and the following day Hamas put on a similarly ostentatious display of force in Gaza City itself.
On 23 September 2005, Hamas organised a procession of its militiamen with a Qassam rocket proudly displayed on a launch pad mounted on a truck. The accidental explosion of the rocket’s charge killed at least fifteen people. Hamas refused to admit responsibility and accused Israel of having fired a missile at the demonstration. Caught up in its own propaganda, Hamas retaliated against Israel. The following day, Hamas and Islamic Jihad fired thirty rockets at Sderot and into the Negev, causing slight injuries to five Israeli civilians. Israel’s reprisal was ferocious. For the first time since 1967, heavy artillery shells were fired into Gaza, and a senior official of Islamic Jihad was killed. Hamas ordered an immediate ceasefire. The Tsahal operation, given the title “Operation First Rain”, continued until 2 October, with F-16 aircraft breaking the sound barrier at regular intervals over the Gaza Strip.
At the end of October, in response to Palestinian mortar fire, Israel unleashed a further operation, “Eternal Renewal”, accompanied by air attacks and the scattering of threatening leaflets over the Gaza Strip. Tsahal banned the international press from the territory. Artillery emplacements were set up in the border zones around the Gaza Strip and work began on a concrete wall several metres high. Palestinian fishing boats, which had been authorised under the Oslo Accords to fish up to a limit of 20 nautical miles from the coast, were henceforth limited to a 9-mile zone. The industrial area at Erez was simply shut down, with no compensation given to the thousands of Palestinians who worked there.
All the economic plans made by Wolfensohn ahead of the withdrawal simply collapsed. Though freedom of movement was now no longer a possibility, Wolfensohn needed at least to ensure that the crossing points would not be arbitrarily shut. He threatened to resign in a bid to persuade the US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to become personally involved. After a night of arduous negotiation, an Agreement on Movement and Access (AMA) was finalised on 15 November 2005. This was the first occasion in which Israel and the Palestinian Authority had engaged with each other over an issue relating to the future of territory evacuated by Israel. The agreement, however, was of a purely technical nature, detailing the arrangements made to check persons and vehicles at the crossing points at Rafah and Qarni, where large-scale scanners were planned for use on trucks en route for the West Bank. A European mission (EUBAM: the European Union Border Assistance Mission), which was in permanent contact with Israel, was given the task of monitoring freedom of passage at the Rafah crossing point, which was jointly administered by the Palestinian Authority and Egypt.
On 24 November, conscious of the reluctance of many within Likud to support disengagement, Sharon established a new centrist political party, Kadima (“Forward”), which was intended to bring together Likud dissidents with like-minded members of the Labour Party. As this major rearrangement of the Israeli political scene was taking place, he put sustained military pressure on the Gaza Strip. During the five years of the second intifada, the ratio of Israeli to Palestinian deaths in and around the Gaza Strip had been one to eleven. In the three months following the disengagement in Gaza, thirty Palestinians had been killed without the death of a single Israeli.
During December 2005 the application of the AMA was frequently suspended by Israel, but rather than being a response to infractions by Fatah in Gaza, this was in reprisal for attacks undertaken in the West Bank (and by Islamic Jihad). Israeli helicopters also targeted the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ brigades and the Popular Resistance Committees. Rockets were fired at Israel in return, though in general without hitting any targets. The Palestinian security services, as the American mediator General Ward had foreseen, showed themselves unable to keep order in the territory. On 21 December, the principal of the American School in Gaza and his deputy, an Australian and a Dutch national respectively, were kidnapped for a period of several hours by PFLP guerrillas. Three days later, Hamas fighters opened fire on a police roadblock where an attempt had been made to disarm them.
The tension was such that Israeli military intelligence began to envisage that a political separation was likely within a year between what they had begun to call “Hamastan” in Gaza and “Fatahstan” in the West Bank. This was the conclusion of a report to the Israeli cabinet by General Aharon Zeevi, head of military intelligence. Even before the so-called Separation Wall constructed by Israel had begun to eat into the edges of Palestinian territory in the West Bank, isolating East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip was already closed off by a continuous barrier that had been reinforced in the months before the withdrawal of the Israeli army from the territory. By this stage, nobody dared to dream of the possibility of a land corridor between the two Palestinian territories.
Sharon suffered a minor stroke on 18 December 2005 and had to step down for a week from the day-to-day conduct of his government for health reasons. When he returned on 25 December 2005, his first move was to initiate Operation “Blue Sky”. This was intended to create a no-go zone in the areas of the northern Gaza Strip previously occupied by Israeli settlements that had recently been evacuated, in order to prevent the area being used to fire rockets into Israel. The prime minister’s objective was in part to enhance his strong-man image, as he looked for support from the right for Kadima, his new party. But on 4 January 2006, everything changed. Having recovered from the apparently minor stroke he had suffered in December, Sharon was struck down by a massive second attack. He lapsed into a coma from which he did not emerge. All his powers were transferred to his deputy, Ehud Olmert. The Sharon era was at an end.
It was against the background of this ongoing crisis in Israeli politics that the Palestinian parliamentary elections took place in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip on 25 January 2006. As president, Mahmoud Abbas had approved an electoral law intended to preserve the dominant position of Fatah. Under the new law, half the 132 seats of the future parliament would be allotted from lists on the basis of proportional representation, which was supposedly more favourable to Fatah, while the other half would continue to be decided as before, by voting in electoral constituencies. Mahmoud Abbas had difficulty in finalising his Fatah list: there were serious incidents during the primary elections the presidency had decided to hold for the selection of Fatah candidates in the Gaza Strip which had led to the cancellation of this unprecedented exercise in democracy. Fatah candidates were instead nominated by the party machine, which fuelled many bitter disputes.
Excerpted with permission from Gaza: A History, Jean-Pierre Filiu, translated from the French by John King, Pan Macmillan.
