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Two men stand before ark in desolate Neve Dekalim synagogue. (AP)
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| By Associated Press August 19, 2005 |
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| Young women sit on roof of their doomed home in Neve Dekalim. (AP) |
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Bikes were parked outside houses in Gaza's largest settlement Friday, but no one will ride them again through its streets. Homes were locked, but their owners won't ever unlock them.
Security forces and journalists, a few rabbis and their families, and a small number of pullout resisters were the only inhabitants of Neve Dekalim on Friday, a day after it went out of existence with the evacuation of more than 1,000 protesters from its main synagogue.
"It is terribly sad to see the empty streets," said Eitan Ben-Mor, who had come from his home in the Golan Heights a week ago to lend support to the pullout resistance, and planned to leave after the morning prayer.
"The children are missing. The parents are missing," he said. "Three days ago, there were people, a community, Sabbath observances, people going to work. ... The most simple things of day-to-day life were taken away cruelly, and by force."
The forced evacuations of Gaza's settlers began Wednesday, and by Friday, most of the 21 settlements were just about emptied in a lightning operation that was to have lasted weeks longer.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, once the patron of the settlement movement, initiated the end of Israel's 38-year occupation of Gaza after concluding there wasn't reason enough to maintain civilians and military in the dense coastal strip, home to 1.3 million Palestinians.
Neve Dekalim's synagogue, once a busy hub of the community's spiritual life, was guarded by security forces on Friday, and nearly empty. Access to morning prayers was strictly limited to people who had received permits, like the rabbis who had come to help resisters through the tough days of evacuation, and were scheduled to leave after prayer.
A few of the young girls and women who had holed up inside the synagogue on Thursday were also set to leave, having stayed behind because there were not enough seats on the buses sent to evacuate protesters.
The lawns outside the synagogue were turned into an impromptu camp for some of the 6,000 security forces who had been mobilized for the largest operation of the evacuation so far. Hundreds were either still cocooned in their sleeping bags or crawling out of them in early morning. Duffel bags were strewn all over, and police and military vehicles were parked alongside curbs.
One soldier slept on the platform of a slide, his legs in combat boots dangling from the side.
Hundreds of homes stood empty, or with belongings packed in cartons, waiting for the military to deliver them to their owners, many now living in temporary housing in southern Israel.
The once-neat streets of this community of 480 families was littered with bottles of water, food and the remains of garbage and tires burned as protesters and security forces faced off in a tense, two-day standoff. A few of the homes were charred by fires set after families left.
"Bye Bye, My Home," read the English-language inscription on the outside wall of one home. "I love you so much, Gush Katif," a reference to the main Gaza settlement bloc of which Neve Dekalim was a part.
Two soldiers were stationed outside the home of a bereaved family that had been given special dispensation to return and pack up its belongings after the weeklong Jewish mourning period for a death in the family was over.
Shipping containers stood outside other homes that the military is to pack up before it razes the town in the weeks to come.
Neve Dekalim's commercial center had been abandoned days earlier in anticipation of the evacuation, with shops reduced to empty hulls.
Evidence of the residents' futile protest against the pullout abounded. The body of one car was plastered with stickers proclaiming "Jews don't expel Jews." The stickers were orange, the color of the pullout resistance.
Tied to the roof of another was a plastic dummy rocket, also orange, bearing the English-language inscription, "This is what's waiting for us" -- a reference to the Palestinian rockets settlers expect will start flying once the Palestinians take over Gaza.
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