Police Confront Settlers in Hebron

Helmeted Israeli police sawed through a steel door Sunday to evict dozens of Jewish settlers from a house in the West Bank town of Hebron, in the first such confrontation since Israel’s new government took office.

Police were pelted with rocks and paint-filled bottles as they moved to expel three families who had occupied the building and more than two dozen settler youths who barricaded themselves inside as a show of support.

Israel’s Supreme Court last week ordered the families out after police determined the fraudulence of documents that purportedly showed the house as having been legally purchased from its Palestinian owner.

Sunday’s eviction was unrelated to plans by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, sworn in Thursday, to remove thousands of settlers from parts of the West Bank as a way to set permanent borders that would embrace Israel’s main settlement blocks. Olmert said Israel would act unilaterally if he decided there were no good prospects for peace talks with the Palestinians.

The new Cabinet, led by Olmert’s centrist Kadima party, convened for the first time Sunday, giving preliminary approval to a long-delayed national budget for 2006.

Olmert hasn’t spelled out how his West Bank withdrawal plans would affect Hebron, a town about 20 miles south of Jerusalem where tensions run high between hard-line settlers and the majority Palestinian population.

But the premier said the government would not tolerate law-breaking.

“Wherever the law is violated, wherever there is illegal squatting and wherever there are attempts to determine these kinds of facts, we will respond immediately, without compromise,” he said at the start of the Cabinet meeting.

Cat-and-mouse clashes broke out between the settler protesters and Israeli police late Saturday and continued into the early morning as authorities prepared for the eviction.

Nineteen police officers were injured before and during the eviction, which involved 700 police officers and more than 1,000 soldiers forming a cordon around Hebron, police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said.

Seventeen activists were arrested, Rosenfeld said.

In the end, all of the settlers were removed during a two-hour operation, most of them carried by officers from the three-story building.

The eviction was the latest sign of increasingly antagonistic relations between settlers and the Israeli government, which last summer removed more than 8,000 Jewish residents from the Gaza Strip and a small portion of the northern West Bank.

Authorities are especially concerned about the behavior of the so-called hilltop youth, radical young settlers motivated by extremist ideology and a growing hostility toward Israel’s government.

In February, more than 200 soldiers, police and protesters were injured when authorities removed protesters from nine houses built in a West Bank settlement outpost called Amona. The high court had ruled that the houses were built illegally on Palestinian land, but the settlers refused to leave and hundreds of youths came to their defense.

Shortly before the Amona operation, a group of Hebron settlers reached agreement with the government to vacate a Palestinian marketplace they had taken over.

In other developments, Hamas and Fatah gunmen clashed near the town of Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip early today in the most serious fighting between the two powerful Palestinian factions since Hamas swept elections in January. Three men, two from Fatah and one from Hamas, were killed and 10 others were injured, authorities said.

Also in Gaza, Palestinian medical officials said a 57-year-old man was killed by Israeli artillery fire early Sunday as he worked on his farm near Beit Lahiya. But Capt. Noa Meir, an Israeli army spokeswoman, said no shells were fired into the area of northern Gaza where the farmer, Hassan Ashafie, was reported to have been fatally struck by shrapnel.

The Israeli military also denied having launched artillery a day earlier in the Beit Lahiya area where Palestinian officials said a 60-year-old man was struck and killed.

The Israelis have stepped up their barrages into the northern Gaza Strip since Friday after a new round of rocket fire into Israel by Palestinian militants.

An Israeli airstrike Friday killed five militants belonging to the Popular Resistance Committees, which have been responsible for most of the rockets launched into southern Israel in recent months.

Israeli officials said the men, targeted at a militant training camp, were on their way to fire more rockets.

On Sunday, Israeli leaders reacted enthusiastically to news that Berkshire Hathaway Inc., the company run by American billionaire Warren E. Buffett, had agreed to pay $4 billion for an 80% stake in Iscar Metalworking Cos., an Israeli tool firm.

Olmert said the deal was an endorsement of the country’s investment climate. The economy has shown signs of recovery since a downturn in 2000.

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Special correspondent Fayed abu Shammalah in Gaza City contributed to this report.