27 October 2004	Wednesday	12 Ramazan 1425

TEL AVIV, Oct 26: Israel's divided parliament on Tuesday approved Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's US-backed plan to withdraw from the occupied Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank.

After a fierce two-day debate, lawmakers voted 67-45, with seven abstentions, for what would be the first evacuation of Jewish settlers from land Palestinians seek for a state. But launching the pullout would require a vote by Mr Sharon's coalition cabinet set for March.

Mr Sharon's victory came at a price for the former general: The plan has splintered his governing coalition and turned many members of his right-wing Likud party against him.

It took the support of Shimon Peres's main opposition Labour party to push the proposal through the 120-member Knesset.

Ariel Sharon, once the Jewish settlers' champion but now the target of their ire, told parliament a pullout from Gaza by the end of next year would increase Israel's security and allow it to seal its grip on larger West Bank settlements.

Some 8,000 Israelis live in the Gaza Strip in hard-to-defend settlements among 1.3 million Palestinians. Under Mr Sharon's plan, all Gaza settlers will be evacuated in return for hundreds of thousands of dollars in state compensation per family.

Four of the 120 settlements Israel has built in the West Bank since it captured that territory along with the Gaza Strip in the 1967 war are to be removed.

As the parliamentary debate raged, anti-pullout nationalists, many of them settler women and children holding placards saying "Sharon is a traitor", rallied outside a Knesset ringed by police. -Reuters