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A settler holds up barbed wire and an Israeli flag on top of the Palm Beach Hotel, also known as "Fortress by the Sea" in Gush Katif. (AP)
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| By israelinsider staff and partners June 30, 2005 |
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Hundreds of Israeli soldiers raided the Gaza Strip hotel to remove about 150 pullout opponents, who were holed up inside.
About 10 busloads of soldiers and paramilitary police -- about 600 security personnel in total -- raided the hotel and went room-to-room to remove the settlers, who had been blockaded inside for several weeks, having stockpiled food and surrounded the hotel with barbed-wire fences.
The army earlier declared the area around the hotel a closed military zone, afterwards declaring the entire Gaza Strip a closed military zone on Thursday.
Israeli radio reporters inside the hotel reported that the soldiers were going room-to-room in the hotel and dragging out the squatters. The protesters were not resisting violently, the radios reported
Some of the extremists inside the hotel belong to the outlawed Kach movement. The squatters are mostly from hard-line enclaves in the West Bank, not from Gaza settlements slated for evacuation.
One woman who was in the hotel with her husband, her seven-year-old son and a year-old baby bawled in an interview with Israel Radio after she was removed from the hotel. Giving her last name as Drori, the woman said she had lost her seven-year-old son in the chaos around the hotel.
"I lost my whole family in the Holocaust. What did we come here for? What did we build a family for, for what? For what?" the woman cried, the one-year-old in her arms. "I am begging you... leave us here. We came to strengthen a strong nation."
The pullout opponents were being loaded onto buses by the soldiers. Some of them were arrested. Some of the protesters shouted at the soldiers when they pulled the women out of the hotel.
The AP contributed to this report.
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