NEVE DEKALIM SETTLEMENT (Gaza Strip): “In the name of the residents of Neve Dekalim, please let the lorries through!” yelled a harried-looking settler through a loudspeaker, pleading with a seething mass of protesters blocking the main gate to Gaza’s largest Jewish settlement.

As a long line of removal trucks waited in the blazing heat to enter, tensions flared between those who wanted to keep up the resistance and those who simply wanted to pack their bags and leave.

“I ask everyone who is blocking the gate to let the lorries through,” Yossi Noiman, who has lived in Neve Dekalim for 25 years, repeated wearily. “Some families have been waiting two days for them.”

In front of the settlement’s imposing metal gate, chaos reigned.

Those resigned to the idea of being evicted from their homes and who just want to get the process over with, traded stinging rebukes with those who wanted to keep up the resistance until the bitter end.

“You can’t do this!” a protester shouted angrily, echoing the sentiments of the hundreds of hardliners massed by the gate, many of whom have come from West Bank settlements or abroad to pit themselves against the army and the police when they come to try to remove every last person from the settlement.

Outside the gate, some 70 lorries, each carrying two containers, lined up along the main road, waiting to enter the settlement pick up the effects of the thousands of residents who will soon be moved back into Israel proper.

One young resident rushed to Noiman’s defence. “Go away! You have nothing to do here,” he yelled at the protesters. “Tomorrow, you will go home. But us — where will we go?”

Those lorries which made it through the gate slowly fanned out through the tree-lined streets and neatly-manicured gardens.

The imminent withdrawal has deeply divided this religious settlement. Police sources and local officials said of the 550 families who live there, 50 had already left, and between 100 and 150 were on the point of leaving.

Many of the “resisters” chose to remain at home with their families, determined to get on with normal daily life. But others braved the brutal summer heat to prevent the soldiers from delivering the eviction orders to every home in the settlement.

And they almost managed it.

Although troops managed to force their way in through a back entrance, most of them could be seen aimlessly wandering around the industrial zone, surrounded by groups of impassioned settlers trying to persuade them not to obey orders.

On the other side of town, the Moryossef family sadly watched the removers load their last few boxes into a truck, all of them carefully labelled “children’s winter clothes” or “bed linen”.

Oriana, a 34-year-old mother who has lived here since she was five, said she admired those still resisting for their strength but believed they were “wasting everybody’s time”—AFP