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Hebron, Sunday Jan. 15, 2006. (AP)
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| By Israel Insider staff and partners January 17, 2006 |
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Israeli soldiers and police, backed by hundreds of reinforcements, patrolled the Judean city of Hebron on Tuesday, armed with an order to expel non-resident Israelis after three days of rioting.
Late Monday, the military declared the Israeli-controlled section of Hebron off-limits to non-residents for the rest of the week, in an attempt to quell unrest, which was touched off by an Israeli government order to evict Jewish "squatters" from Jewish homes in an area inhabited by members of a Jewish community expelled in the 1929 pogroms. Later the residences were taken over by areas and turned into a marketplace.
Military officials said non-residents who have already entered the city wouldn't be forcibly evacuated on Tuesday unless they were violent, but added that those marching orders could change if rioting were to reignite.
Police Commissioner Moshe Karadi ordered the number of officers in the Hebron area doubled, sending an additional 250 police, including riot units, into the city, police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said.
No unrest was reported by mid-morning Tuesday.
Hebron is home to 500 Jewish residents who live among 170,000 Palestinians in the only Judean city divided into Palestinian and Israeli zones.
Tradition holds that the biblical Jewish patriarchs are buried there, and the city could become a focal point in a battle over Judea and Samaria if Israel decides to follow its recent Gaza Strip pullout by ceding land with far more biblical significance.
Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has ordered security forces to deal sternly with defiant settlers and their backers.
"This lawlessness will cease and we will do whatever we have to do to stop this," government official David Baker said Tuesday.
Hoping to signal to the government that future withdrawals would not be as painless as the Gaza pullout, hundreds of protesters flocked to Hebron in the past week to fight eviction orders issued to eight settler families.
The families moved into an empty Palestinian market four years ago after Palestinian gunmen killed a 10-month-old Jewish baby. They ignored an Israeli court order to leave voluntarily by Jan. 15, and the military has said it would remove them by mid-February.
Hebron settlers and their sympathizers - many of them teenagers and some of them masked - began rampaging through the area Friday to protest the eviction orders, torching empty Palestinian shops and a home, throwing stones at Palestinian houses and trying to rush off-limits areas of the city. The unrest resumed Saturday night, after the Jewish Sabbath, and continued through Monday.
Riot police, border police and officers on horseback charged through the market on Monday and into a nearby enclave of Jewish settlers, where they stormed buildings to force protesters to evacuate the rooftops where they fled.
Elsewhere in Judea and Samaria, Israeli troops shot dead a wanted member of the terrorist Palestinian Hamas group in the town of Tulkarem overnight during an exchange of fire, the military and Hamas said Tuesday.
The army said the man came out of a building blazing at troops with an automatic weapon in each hand, and was killed when the soldiers returned fire. One of the soldiers was lightly wounded, the military said.
Hamas, in a statement, identified the man as Sabed Salah e-Din Iyada, 24, a Hamas military leader in Tulkarem.
"The blood of the chief commander of the Tulkarem brigades will not be shed in vain," the statement read. "The Zionist enemy will pay a heavy price, God willing."
Hamas' refusal to disarm ahead of Jan. 25 Palestinian parliamentary elections in which it is contending for the first time has created severe friction between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Most recently, Israel had threatened to ban Palestinian voting in east Jerusalem because Hamas was to appear on the ballot, provoking a counterthreat from Paelstinian leader Mahmoud Abbas to call off the vote.
The crisis was defused earlier this week when the Israeli Cabinet agreed to allow Palestinian voting in the symbolically significant city, which both sides claim as their capital, provided Hamas didn't appear on the ballot.
"It was important for Israel to allow the elections to go forward so the Palestinians wouldn't have an excuse not to carry out their obligations," Olmert told the visiting Spanish foreign Minister, Miguel Moratinos.
Hamas, Olmert added, "must be disarmed, and there will be no compromise on this matter," the prime minister's office said in a statement.
In Gaza, the Palestinian interior minister, Nasser Youssef, asked gunmen from Hamas and other militant factions to store their weapons ahead of the balloting to keep election-related violence down, but they refused.
The AP contributed to this report.
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