Sharon Pushes Ahead With Gaza Plan

Facing unrelenting criticism from Jewish settlers, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said Monday nothing would deter him from pushing forward with his plan to pull out of the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank.

Scattered fighting in Gaza, meanwhile, killed at least five Palestinian militants.

Sharon, a longtime patron of the settlements, spoke a day after holding a tense meeting with settler leaders that ended with battle lines drawn between the two sides.

Sharon has pledged to put his "disengagement plan" to a parliamentary vote Oct. 25. Despite a rift in his hard-line Likud Party, he is expected to prevail with the backing of dovish opposition parties.

Sharon told reporters Monday he is required to bring his plan to parliament and he intends to follow through, despite pressure from the settlers.

"The responsibility of managing the issues of the country, the responsibility of the future of the country, is not the concern of just one group. It is the concern of the entire nation, and this burden is placed on my shoulders, and this is how I plan to behave," he said.

Settler leaders called their Sunday meeting with their former ally "disgraceful" and pressed for a national referendum while pledging to torpedo the withdrawal.

"The meeting was a disgrace," said settler Yehoshua Mor-Yosef. Sharon, he said, is leading the country to a bottomless pit.

Gaza settlers, scheduled to meet Tuesday with Sharon, were considering canceling the session.

"The prime minister is intractable," said Eran Sternberg, spokesman for the Gaza settlers. "He runs roughshod over everyone. He thinks, 'I am the nation, and the nation is me.'"

About 8,200 settlers live in 21 Gaza settlements among 1.3 million Palestinians. Sharon decided the settlers cannot remain in the hostile, poverty-stricken seaside territory. His plan also calls for evacuating four tiny enclaves in the northern part of the West Bank next summer.

Sharon says his plan will increase Israel's security after four years of fighting with the Palestinians and help consolidate control over large chunks of the West Bank. The settlers accuse Sharon of caving in to Palestinian violence, warning that dismantling any settlements sets a dangerous precedent.

The settlers, as well as hard-line allies within Sharon's government, have been pushing him to hold a referendum on the withdrawal. He has rejected that, calling it a delaying tactic by his opponents. Legal experts say the process for holding the vote could take months.

Polls show about two-thirds of Israelis support the pullout, despite large, well-funded and publicized protests by the settlers and their backers. Sharon already has lost two separate votes within his party on his plan.

Likud members met in a closed session Monday afternoon to discuss holding a national referendum despite Sharon's opposition. Even aides and party officials were excluded.

In the wake of his meeting with the settlers, Sharon said he was especially concerned by an influential rabbi's recent call on Orthodox Jewish soldiers — backed by dozens of other rabbis — to refuse orders to evacuate the settlements.

"The worst thing is to give in to threats of violence and to talk about disobeying orders," Sharon said. "These are very grave things. I believe these things will be prevented because these are real dangers."

The threat of extremist violence is very sensitive in Israel. In 1995, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by an ultranationalist Jew opposed to his peacemaking with the Palestinians.

Fighting in Gaza has increased in recent months as Israel and Palestinian militants each try to declare victory ahead of the planned Israeli withdrawal, and violence continued Monday.

Israeli troops shot and killed two heavily armed Palestinian gunmen as they cut through the Gaza border fence, reports CBS News Correspondent Robert Berger. The army said they were on their way to attack a kibbutz, or communal, farming community. Nearby, two Islamic Jihad militants were killed by troops when they were spotted planting a bomb. A fifth gunman was killed in a shootout near a Jewish settlement.

The violence came days after the army ended a broad operation in northern Gaza aimed at preventing Palestinians from firing homemade rockets at Israeli towns.

Peter Hansen, commissioner of the U.N. agency charged with caring for Palestinian refugees, inspected damaged buildings, including a demolished kindergarten, in northern Gaza.

Hansen said his agency had confirmed 107 deaths, including 30 people under the age of 18. He also said 90 homes were destroyed, leaving an estimated 600-700 people homeless.

"The damage, of course, is overwhelming and very great. It is the largest incursion we have seen during this current intefadeh," he said.

Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia appealed for foreign countries to condemn the offensive.

"We call on the whole world, the United Nations, to come and see the volume, the size of the tragedy, the size of mass destruction, caused by the Israelis' war machine in northern Gaza," he said.

A human rights group's report Monday said Israel has violated international law by systematically destroying Palestinian homes in the Gaza Strip town of Rafah in a bid to create a buffer zone along the border with Egypt.

The report, by New York-based Human Rights Watch, also accused the Israeli military of exaggerating the threat posed by weapons smuggling tunnels running from Rafah to Egypt — the main justification for home demolitions — and failing to use less destructive measures to uncover and destroy the tunnels.

"We've seen the piece-by-piece destruction of up to 10 percent of Rafah," said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch.

Since fighting began four years ago, some 16,000 people have been made homeless in Rafah, many of them during a large-scale army incursion in May, the report said. Roth called the destruction gratuitous, saying the army was retaliating for the killing of five soldiers on the patrol road along the border.

The army, which had no immediate comment on the report, says the demolition of homes along the Gaza-Egypt border is needed to prevent Palestinian militants from smuggling arms through tunnels. Also, the houses provide gunmen with cover to attack troops patrolling the border.

"Neither excuse could justify the wholesale destruction in Rafah," Roth said.

The 135-page report, titled "Razing Rafah," argues that the security considerations are secondary to Israel's desire for a large clear border area to "facilitate long-term control over the Gaza Strip."

"The pattern of destruction strongly suggests that Israeli forces demolished homes wholesale, regardless of whether they posed a specific threat," the report said, basing its findings on tours of the area and satellite imagery.