JERUSALEM – In the first major showdown with Jewish settlers during the tenure of acting Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, hundreds of club-wielding riot police fought crowds of stone-throwing protesters who barricaded themselves in illegally built homes in a West Bank settlement outpost yesterday, hauling off the demonstrators before the structures were demolished.
The fierce clash at the unauthorized outpost of Amona, in which scores were injured, was more violent than confrontations between the security forces and settlers during the evacuation last summer of Israel's 21 settlements in the Gaza Strip and four more in the West Bank.
Embittered by the Gaza pullout and concerned that Olmert may be planning further withdrawals in the West Bank if he wins an election March 28, hundreds of settlers, mostly teenagers from other communities, rallied around the empty houses in Amona and battled police for hours.
Police in riot gear, some of them on horseback, came under a hail of rocks as they drove back crowds gathered around the nine houses and then broke through shutters and windows to remove people inside.
When officers climbed ladders to reach protesters on roofs ringed with barbed wire, they were hit with paint, eggs, sand and mud. Settlers used long poles to drive back the police and burned tires, sending up thick plumes of black smoke.
Dousing the protesters with a water cannon and riding a bulldozer shovel to the roofs, club-swinging officers forced holdouts into the shovel to bring them down.
“Stop! Why are you doing this?” a settler shouted over a loudspeaker as the police moved in. “Every house destroyed is a victory for Hamas,” said a banner hung by protesters on one building.
Medics said more than 200 protesters and police were hurt, most of them lightly, but one officer and a youth were reported to be seriously injured. Two rightist lawmakers who were with the protesters also were hurt.
Nearly 3,000 officers took part in the operation to clear the houses, police said, facing a similar number of protesters and other settlers who flocked to the scene. Dozens of demonstrators were arrested.
The settlers accused Olmert of muscle-flexing to show voters that he was as resolute as Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who evacuated the Gaza settlements over the strong protests of the settlers and their supporters. Sharon has been in a coma since he suffered a devastating stroke Jan. 4.
Amona, north of Ramallah, was built in the 1990s on private Palestinian land, and some 30 families live in the outpost in mobile homes. The nine permanent houses, built without permits, were bulldozed yesterday after anti-settlement group Peace Now obtained a Supreme Court ruling to enforce a demolition order issued by the authorities in 2004 but never carried out.
