Israel removes settlers from disputed Hebron house (Roundup)

Dec 4, 2008, 13:49 GMT

Israeli security forces forcibly evict some 250 settlers and their supporters from a disputed building in the West Bank city of Hebron, on 04 December 2008. Three weeks earlier the High Court of Justice had ordered its immediate evacuation. EPA/MIRIAM ALSTER

Tel Aviv/Hebron, West Bank - Catching the occupants by surprise, hundreds of baton-wielding Israeli police stormed a house in Hebron Thursday afternoon to forcibly evict settlers who had barricaded themselves inside, in defiance of a court order.

The police burst into the house in the divided southern West Bank city shortly after 2 pm (1200 GMT), reportedly as the scores of settlers inside were eating lunch, and started forcibly hauling them outside, amid scuffles, pushing and shoving.

The settlers said the police used stun grenades and tear gas as they carried out the evacuation.

Some of the settlers, who were mainly young, allowed themselves to be led quietly away from the house, but others, including women, scuffled with, or pushed and shoved, the police, and the soldiers who had formed a protective cordon around the house.

Around 20 people from both sides were injured lightly, but a police officer was taken to hospital in moderate condition after a substance, which some reports said was acid, was thrown in his eye.

As the police were finishing the evacuation around one hour after it began, a Palestinian living near the house told Israel Radio that settlers were clashing with local Palestinian residents.

At one stage his conversation was interrupted as he gasped and coughed from teargas which he said soldiers had fired in an attempt to disperse the rioters.

Other reports spoke of a Palestinian wounded by gunfire from a settler, and other radical Jews tried to break into another abandoned house in Hebron, from which they had been evacuated on Wednesday.

There were also protests against the evacuation at the entrance to Jerusalem, as demonstrators tried to prevent vehicles entering and leaving the city. Around 20 protestors were arrested.

The evacuation of the house - known in Hebrew as 'the house of contention' - came several hours after Defence Minister Ehud Barak met in Tel Aviv with settler leaders, in an attempt to forge a deal which would allow the evacuation to take place without violence.

Settler leaders later accused the defence minister of acting in bad faith by ordering the evacuation to go ahead, and one observer, Channel 2 News reporter Moshe Nussbaum, said he thought Barak had deliberately tried to lull the occupants of the house into a false sense of security.

Barak's office issued a statement saying the police were given the green light to move in after all attempts to reach a voluntary evacuation failed.

Settlers occupied the house in the divided West Bank city in early 2007, saying they were the tenants of an American Jew who purchased it and that they have documents proving it. Its Palestinian owner however denies this.

The Israeli supreme court on November 16 ordered the house to be handed over to the state until a lower court rules on its rightful ownership.

But the settlers refused to move, and their numbers were bolstered by right-wing radicals, mostly youth, who flocked to the house in an attempt to prevent its evacuation.

Rioting broke out in the city on Tuesday and continued Wednesday, as mainstream Israeli officials vowed to evacuate the house, and said the violent actions of its occupants had to stop.

Even public figures normally sympathetic to the settlers spoke out against the Hebron radicals, with one religious legislator saying that the youth occupying the disputed house 'is a different youth; this is youth that has no God, no rabbis and no leaders.'