More trauma likely in Gaza reburial plan

GUSH KATIF, Gaza Strip -- Sara Zweig wasn't in the car when her sister, driving home to her Jewish settlement in the Gaza Strip, was shot dead by Palestinians three years ago last month. But she suffers from the lingering trauma of having heard the gunfire.

''She was talking to me on her cellphone about the new house she was building and all the things she wanted to have done inside. Then I heard a number of shots and I didn't hear her voice again," Zweig said recently at the cemetery of Gush Katif, the main settlement bloc in Gaza, where her sister is buried.

This summer, when Israel plans to evacuate thousands of settlers from Gaza as part of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's disengagement plan, Zweig will endure a second trauma along with dozens of other families. Authorities are planning to dig up the remains of their loved ones -- 46 bodies in all -- buried in this hilltop graveyard and reinter them in cemeteries inside Israel.

The body transfer -- just one of the many minute details of evacuation -- is a grisly reminder of the complexities involved in uprooting 8,000 Israelis from homes and neighborhoods that some have inhabited for 25 years.

It is also a logistical nightmare.

For one thing, Jewish law demands strict respect for the dead, prohibiting the exhumation of bodies in all but the most extraordinary circumstances. And authorities can probably expect little cooperation from the settlers. While some of the mostly religious residents of Gush Katif have begun looking for new homes in Israel, many still cling to the idea that the evacuation will be called off, either as a result of their protests or God's intervention.

''We're not thinking about where to transfer the grave because we don't believe we'll have to leave this place," said Zweig, 31, who moved to Gush Katif's Neve Dekalim settlement eight years ago in the footsteps of her now-dead sister.

The plan to disengage from Gaza, which received final approved by Sharon's government last month, is as ambitious a logistical operation as some of Israel's wars.

A huge contingency of troops and private contractors is expected to spend eight weeks in Gaza, starting July 20, forcibly removing settlers who refuse to leave, and then dismantling much of what the government helped build in Gaza's 21 settlements over the last three decades -- around 1,500 homes, hundreds of hothouses, scores of public buildings and shops, and 22 synagogues, according to a list compiled by authorities.

Some of the building material will be carted off and recycled. The cost of removing the unusable wreckage alone will run into the millions of dollars, a Western official familiar with details of the planning said.

The arrangements for relocating the cemetery -- the only Jewish settler cemetery in Gush Katif -- could be the most complicated. Authorities overseeing the disengagement decided early on that leaving graves in Gaza, which is home to about 1.2 million Palestinians, would expose them to desecration. With Israeli troops expected to be fully out of the Strip for the first time since 1967, the families' access to the cemetery could not be guaranteed.

Security officials said the transfer is being planned by state-paid rabbis from the army and from Israel's Chief Rabbinate, who have sought religious rulings from the highest rabbinical authorities. One concern, they said, was what to do with the bodies of those settlers whose loved ones had not decided by the time of the withdrawal where they intend to move.

Sharon, asked about the cemetery relocation in a recent interview with the religious magazine Mishpacha (Family), said: ''There are Torah laws [that describe] how to deal with this. . . . These issues will be handled exactly [the way] they're supposed to be."

But some religious figures argue that moving the bodies would itself constitute a desecration.

''Jewish law states clearly that you don't disturb the bones of Jews," said Eliezer Orbach, the head of Gush Katif's religious council. He said respecting the sanctity of corpses was bound up with the belief that all Jews would be resurrected with the arrival of the Messiah.

Orbach, who has served as the caretaker of the Gush Katif cemetery since it was established in 1987, said he has attended the funerals of more young people in the settlement bloc over the years than old, in part because of Palestinian attacks. Of 46 bodies buried there, eight belong to babies or children, four were soldiers in their early 20s when they died, and another dozen or so were in their 30s and 40s. The oldest Gush Katif resident buried at the cemetery was around 50 when he died, according to Orbach.

Shlomo Yulis, who also lives in Neve Dekalim, buried his 14-year-old son at the cemetery a decade ago after he died of leukemia.

With the Oslo peace process underway at the time, Yulis said, the specter of a Gaza evacuation loomed even then.

''My son knew he was dying and he was worried that if we buried him here and then we would be evacuated, that we'd have to go through the trauma of burial twice," Yulis said at his home in the settlement.

''But he decided that since he was born here and since this was his home, he wanted to be buried here," he said. Yulis said he and his wife had still not given any thought to where they would live if the withdrawal takes place.

Zweig says her family faced a similar dilemma with her sister, Ahuva, three years ago. Now, she says, what angers her most is the fact that government officials involved in planning the withdrawal have made no direct contact with the settler families -- those whose lives are rooted in Gaza and those whose loved ones are buried there.

''My father-in-law says that when he was asked by the government to settle here 25 years ago, they looked him in the eye and talked about Zionism and all the reasons it was important to live here," Zweig said at the cemetery.

''Now that they want us to leave, no one has the nerve to confront us directly and hear our side of the argument," she said.