Settlers to get $500,000: Israeli cabinet approves plan
JERUSALEM, Sept 14: Israel's security cabinet approved cash advances on Tuesday to entice Gaza settlers to evacuate their homes, as police investigated death threats against Prime Minister Ariel Sharon sparked by his pullout plan.
Tension has mounted in recent days with far-right opponents of Mr Sharon's plan raising the spectre of violent resistance and the prime minister accusing them of trying to incite civil war.
Mr Sharon received a boost when senior ministers voted to budget 200,000 dollars to 500,000 dollars per settler family as part of accelerated preparations to uproot all 21 settlements in Gaza and four of 120 enclaves in the West Bank by the end of next year.
He is counting on down payments, expected to amount to a third of the total compensation packages, to coax most Jewish settlers to leave voluntarily, avoiding clashes with soldiers.
Earlier on Tuesday, Mr Sharon rejected a call by Binyamin Netanyahu, his rival in the rightist Likud party, for a referendum on a Gaza pullout. Mr Sharon dismissed it as a stalling tactic.
Hours after the security cabinet's vote, Israeli police said they had launched an investigation into anonymous telephone threats against Sharon received at a Jerusalem office orchestrating the Gaza "disengagement" strategy.
The Israeli news website YNet said officials in the Shin Bet security service feared for Mr Sharon's safety and "would prefer for the prime minister to avoid leaving his office".
Jerusalem police chief Ilan Franco was quoted in local media as saying he had given the investigation "high priority". Shin Bet chief Avraham Dichter told a parliamentary committee in July there were Jewish extremists who wished to see Sharon dead and were backed by dozens opposed to the Gaza plan. Since then, security has been tightened around Sharon, once the godfather of the settlement movement but now reviled as a traitor by his former followers.
HEATED RHETORIC: An ultra-nationalist Jew assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 amid an outpouring of far-right hostility to interim peace accords signed with Palestinians.
Sharon has provoked similarly heated rhetoric with his plan to "disengage" from four years of conflict with the Palestinians by uprooting 8,000 settlers in the occupied Gaza Strip. Many Palestinians see the withdrawal plan as a ruse to trade impoverished Gaza for large swathes of the West Bank, where most of Israel's 240,000 settlers live.
Polls show most Israelis support Sharon's plan to evacuate Gaza's hard-to-defend settlements, though his opponents say ceding any of the land Israel captured in the 1967 war would be a "reward for terror".
An Israeli official said Israel's Galilee region and the Negev desert had been identified as "priority areas" for relocation. -Reuters
