Largest Gaza Settlement Evacuated

(CBS/AP)  Israeli security force on Thursday completed the evacuation of Israel's largest settlement, Neve Dekalim, officials said.

During the day, troops dragged out hundreds of pullout opponents who had holed up inside Neve Dekalim's synagogue in a defiant last stand. By Thursday night, all the settlers and their supporters were gone, army and police confirmed.

It was a sight many thought they would never see: Israeli troops storming Gaza settlement synagogues Thursday and dragging fellow Jews out of the buildings.

The protesters in Kfar Darom responded by hurling debris, lightbulbs filled with paint, bags of milk, eggs and what police said was acid at the troops, in the most violent confrontation since the forced removals began this week.

As forces cut through the barbed wire to reach the synagogue's roof, some protesters used sticks to try to push away the ladders used by security forces to reach the roof. Other soldiers reached the roof via shipping containers hoisted by a crane.

A sign hanging from the roof said, "We won't forget. We won't forgive."

Thousands of troops rushed up a ramp to the synagogue in Neve Dekalim, after throwing sand on cooking oil that the protesters had spread in their path and hours of unsuccessful negotiations.

The settlers could be heard over a loudspeaker urging the soldiers not to go into the synagogue. "Don't evacuate Jews from this holy place," said the announcements.

CBS News Correspondent Robert Berger reports the settlers had been playing this sort of psychological warfare with the soldiers, telling them that removing them from the synagogue is wrong, that it's against the Bible, that it's against God, that it's against Zionism.

In the end, the men were carried out of the building, while the women were escorted out on their feet, reports Berger.

Capturing the Neve Dekalim and Kfar Darom synagogues is an important victory for the forces. The people inside — mostly extremist youths from the West Bank and Israel, not Gaza —provided some of the fiercest resistance to the pullout.

The presence of four settlers with weapons at another settlement forced troops to postpone that outpost's evacuation and send in negotiators.

Settlers elsewhere burned houses, fields and tires in protest.

"They don't understand why the government is doing that to them. There is no peace agreement, there is no promise that the terror will stop, there is no promise that this is the last withdrawal," member of parliament Yuli Edelstein told Berger.

• 1
• 2
• Next Page »