Sharon cleared to rescue Gaza pullout plan

Israel's plan to pull out of Gaza next year passed a crucial test yesterday when Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, his Government crippled by opposition to the pullout, easily won party approval to ask the dovish Labour to join his coalition.

Defeat in the party vote could have spelled delay or even death for the Gaza withdrawal and an end to hopes for restarting Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations in its wake.

Now the way is clear for removing 21 Israeli settlements from Gaza and four from the West Bank next northern summer, as Sharon proposed, despite harsh criticism from his own party.

At the end of a tense day of voting by members of the 3000-member Likud Party Central Committee, Cabinet minister Israel Katz announced that the final count of the vote was 62 per cent in favour of Sharon's proposal and 38 per cent against.

The win clears the way to adding Labour, a partner solidly in favour of the Gaza pullout and resumption of peace negotiations, giving Sharon a majority government for the first time since June.

There is opposition among Labour activists to joining their arch-rival Sharon in another Government, after their first joint Government broke up in 2002.

But party leader Shimon Peres strongly favours entering the government, and approval is expected.

The Likud committee already voted in August against inviting Labour to join the Government. But after Sharon fired a key coalition partner for voting against his budget on December 1, his coalition was more tenuous than ever.

He warned that the choice now was now Labour or elections.

Worried about a low turnout that would favour his opponents, Sharon made a rare appeal to his backers to vote.

"I want to say that we are standing before great opportunities and events that could be historical, and I won't let anything or anyone harm the opportunity of the state of Israel to take advantage of these opportunities," he told Army Radio.

Sharon defied his party and his own ideology when he first presented his plan to remove all 21 Jewish settlements from Gaza and four small ones from the West Bank a year ago. For decades, he was the patron of the settlements, enabling their construction and expansion, and his Likud hotly opposed conceding any land to the Palestinians or the creation of a Palestinian state.

Over the past year, however, Sharon has changed his policy, but most of his party refused to go along with him.

Sharon says the Gaza settlements, with 8200 Jews living among more than a million Palestinians, are untenable and must be removed.

He believes that would give Israel a better chance to retain its main settlement blocs in the West Bank, where most of the 236,000 settlers there live, and it would also head off international peace efforts unfavourable to Israel.

Opponents reject evacuating any settlements as a matter of principle and also warn that an Israeli pullout from Gaza would lead to international pressure to withdraw from the West Bank.

The Likud rank and file overwhelmingly voted against the withdrawal in a party referendum on May 2. Sharon ignored the vote and pressed ahead.

But he finally ran out of political elbow room. After dismissing all his coalition partners in spats over the withdrawal plan and the state budget, he has only his Likud in the Government.

Likud has 40 seats in the 120-member Parliament, but up to half its members oppose the Gaza withdrawal. Without Labour's 21 votes and at least one smaller ultra-Orthodox Jewish party for insurance against the Likud rebels, Sharon could lose a no-confidence vote at any time and be voted out of office.

Arafat's death on November 11 opened new possibilities for a breakthrough in long-deadlocked Mideast peace talks, since Israel and the United States considered him an obstacle.

But a lull in fighting after his death has ended. On Thursday, an Israeli aircraft fired a missile at a car carrying Palestinian militants in southern Gaza, wounding three men, Palestinian security officials said. One was Jamal Abu Samhadana, one of the two Gaza commanders of the Popular Resistance Committees, an umbrella group of militant factions.

In the air-strike between the towns of Khan Younis and Rafah, the militants jumped from their car seconds before the missile, launched from an unmanned drone aircraft overhead, destroyed the vehicle, witnesses said.

"God willing, we will always be in the trench of resistance," said Abu Samhadana, his head bandaged as he lay on a hospital stretcher.

It was the second time in four months that Abu Samhadana, 40, had survived an Israeli attempt to kill him. He escaped a missile strike on his car in August.

The PRC, with the militant Islamic Jihad group and the Abu Rish Brigades, claimed responsibility for killing three Israeli soldiers at an Army post in a Gaza Jewish settlement in September.

Palestinian security sources had blamed the PRC for a bombing last year that killed three US security men in a diplomatic convoy passing through Gaza. It denied involvement.

- REUTERS