January 7, 2006	Saturday	Zilhaj 6, 1426

JERUSALEM, Jan 6: Jewish settlers evicted from the Gaza Strip by the now critically ill Ariel Sharon, said the premier’s plight was divine retribution for selling out to the Palestinians.

And other hardliners even said he had fallen under the spell of a death curse they put on him last summer.

“The Torah says that whoever touches the land of Israel gets his punishment. Everything is from God,” said Koby Zohar, a 30-year-old teacher, standing outside a four-star Jerusalem hotel that is his temporary home.

Along with his wife and four children, Zohar was forced out of his home in the Gaza Strip last summer. The Israeli state is paying for their sojourn in the Shalom Hotel until new permanent housing is ready.

Although Sharon masterminded Israel’s settlement policy, it was he who decided to dismantle 25 of them last year, mostly in the Gaza Strip, after a 38-year occupation.

This infuriated rightwingers, many of whom want the modern Israeli state to incorporate all the Palestinian territories, which they believe are included within Eretz Israel, the Biblical land of the Jews.

“I haven’t shed any tears for Sharon,” said Rina Akerman, a 42-year-old religious instructor who with her psychologist husband and 11 children live in the Shalom Hotel. “I don’t want him to die; I just want him to leave politics. It can only be better after him,” she said, in comments echoed by several other settlers lodging in the hotel.

Some far-right activists have even said that a ‘pulsa denura’ (Aramaic for ‘lashes of fire’) death curse they cast on Sharon in July had kicked in.

“Nothing could kill Sharon, and he said his ancestors lived until they were over 100 years old, but we got him with the pulsa denura,” Baruch Ben-Yosef, one of the participants at the July event, told the Jerusalem Post.—AFP