Israeli parliament clears way for Gaza pullout plan

JERUSALEM -- Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel overcame the last legislative obstacle to his hard-fought plan for withdrawing from Gaza when parliament ratified the 2005 state budget yesterday.

Capping a year of political upheaval, the 58-to-36 vote dashed the last hope of pro-settler rightists of getting parliament to torpedo what would be Israel's first removal of settlements from occupied territory that Palestinians want for a state.

But diehard settlers vowed to take to the streets and raised the specter of civil war over the withdrawal. Parliament had rejected a bill for a referendum on the pullout on Monday.

Mediators see the plan as a catalyst for negotiations on a US-devised peace ''road map" to Palestinian statehood in Gaza and the West Bank, lands Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war and where Palestinians launched an uprising in 2000.

Diplomatic prospects have been brightened by a cease-fire that has taken root since moderate Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was elected in January, succeeding the late Yasser Arafat.

''With great persistence, [Sharon] is changing Middle East reality," the Israeli vice prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said after the vote. ''I am far from saying this plan will bring peace and quiet . . . but it creates a chance, it creates hope."

Sharon's ''Disengagement Plan" entails uprooting 21 Jewish enclaves in Gaza and four of 120 settlements in the West Bank starting in late July. He views those settlements as liabilities.

But Sharon also intends to cement Israel's grip on wider tracts of the West Bank where some 230,000 settlers live on suburban-style settlements that are still expanding.

Palestinians welcome the prospect of taking over Gaza. But they fear Sharon's West Bank policy will effectively annex territory at the heart of their aspirations to a viable state.

''The international community must make sure that the Gaza disengagement will be the beginning and not the end [of peace efforts]," Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat said in response to the budget vote.

''And that what is applicable for Gaza settlements should also be applied for West Bank settlements," he said.

Sharon won a long struggle for a budget majority by striking a funding deal with the centrist opposition Shinui party, with 15 seats, to foil a mutiny by 13 nationalist members of his right-wing Likud faction.

Failure to pass the $61 billion budget by tomorrow would have triggered an election in June. That would have delayed or derailed the withdrawal.

The government has given the 8,500 settlers in Gaza and a few hundred in the West Bank until the last week of July to accept compensation and go willingly or be evicted.

But settler leaders said hundreds of thousands of protesters would flood territory set to be vacated and that many settlers see as a biblical birthright. The Israeli Army intends to seal off the areas before the withdrawal.

Eran Sternberg, spokesman for the Gaza settlers, said that they had lost faith in a ''rotten and corrupt political system.

''We won't let this happen," he said. ''Hundreds of thousands will soon make their way to [our areas]. They will prove this pullout is impossible. The police cannot handle hundreds of thousands of people -- they will face many challenges."