Israeli protesters marching to Gaza

NETIVOT, Israel -- More than 20,000 Israeli demonstrators, defying a massive mobilization of police and soldiers, began their march from this southern Israeli town to the Gaza Strip yesterday to protest Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan to dismantle Jewish settlements next month and return the area to the Palestinians.

From Tel Aviv and Jerusalem in the center of the country, to Kiryat Shmona on Israel's northern border, thousands of police combed highways for Gaza-bound protesters, even boarding chartered buses to seize the drivers' licenses. Thousands of soldiers were deployed along the roads from Netivot to the Kissufim crossing into the Gaza Strip.

It was the broadest face-off yet between authorities and opponents of the withdrawal, and though no violence was reported, the spiraling tensions foreshadowed what could be a fierce confrontation when Israeli police and soldiers pull defiant settlers from their homes in Gaza and in the northern West Bank starting in mid-August.

At the end of the day, police agreed to let those protesters who did make it to Netivot -- many carrying sleeping bags and gear for what they planned to be a three-day hike into Gaza -- camp out 2 miles down the road in Kfar Maimon, a small town about 12 miles outside the Strip, increasing the likelihood of a renewed standoff today over the attempted march.

In Gaza City, meanwhile, Egyptian mediators tried to salvage a five-month-old truce between Israel and the Palestinians, meeting with President Mahmoud Abbas and with militant groups that fired dozens of rockets and mortars at Israeli communities in recent days. Abbas said he wanted to coax the groups into recommitting to the cease-fire, but he did not rule out using force.

''We don't accept going to civil war," Abbas told reporters in Gaza. ''We hope and pray we won't have to shoot anyone."

Seven Palestinian militants and one Israeli civilian were killed in a surge of recent violence in and around Gaza, a tinderbox for years. These days, the turmoil is manifest not just between Israelis and Palestinians but also among them.

Responding to a call to action from rabbis as well as leaders of the Jewish settlement movement, tens of thousands of Israelis tried to reach Netivot for yesterday's protest. Pinchas Wallerstein, head of the Council of Jewish Communities in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, said the event was aimed at comforting the roughly 10,000 Jewish settlers who stand to be evacuated from their homes under Sharon's plan.

But police said many of the protesters intended to enter the Gaza settlements and remain there to further complicate the withdrawal next month, which army commanders have said would be one of the most challenging operations troops have had to carry out in years.

Early yesterday, police commissioner Moshe Karadi declared the protest march illegal and sent thousands of police to screen traffic across Israel in an unprecedented effort to prevent demonstrators from getting to Netivot.

''If people decided to try to get into Gaza by force, I think that would be a good thing," said Aaron Fox, one of the protesters, who moved to Israel from Los Angeles three years ago.

Fox, who studied architecture in Israel but is unemployed, traveled part of the way to Netivot by train and part of the way by hitchhiking from his home in Haifa, where the bus he was on got pulled over by police.

He repeated what many right-wing Israelis hold as sacred: that the land Israel captured from Arab states in the 1967 war, where 240,000 settlers now live among 3.5 million Palestinians, rightfully belongs to the Jews. ''It is morally wrong to move Jews from their homes," Fox said, dressed in an orange shirt, the color chosen by government critics for their protest.

Near him, a crowd of demonstrators swayed in prayer, and children, including pre-schoolers, waved banners against the withdrawal. Rivka Hebroni, 42, of Jerusalem, brought her six children, ages 5 to 22, to the march, each wearing an orange shirt and a backpack with a sleeping bag. Her youngest son dozed on her shoulder.

''The government is trying to shut our mouths," Hebroni said. ''This country has become more a dictatorship than a democracy."

On stage, Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, a settler, said Sharon was following in the footsteps of the Jews' worst enemies by evacuating settlers from Gaza. He implored the Israeli leader: ''Don't fear a million and a half Arabs [the Palestinian population of Gaza]. Don't fear a million and a half murderers."

Sharon, who served for decades as the settlers' main political patron, has described the dismantling of Gaza's 21 settlements as a demographic necessity. He has also moved to tighten Israel's grip over many West Bank settlements, even as he sought Abbas's cooperation in the Gaza withdrawal.

In his meeting with foreign reporters yesterday, Abbas criticized attacks on Israel carried out by Hamas and Islamic Jihad -- the two militant Islamic groups operating in the West Bank and Gaza -- as running counter to Palestinian interests.

''These shootings and rockets will only hinder the process of withdrawal and the future process of negotiations," he said. ''We want this withdrawal to be clean and to be final."

In Gaza City, police were seen going around the main streets with cherry-picker trucks removing the green Hamas flags from utility polls but leaving behind the yellow flags of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a militia linked with Abbas's Fatah faction.

Along the beach at sunset where families sat on plastic chairs to escape the heat, Insaf Hassouneh, 40, said she believed the disengagement would only lead to more internal strife of the kind that left several Palestinians dead over the weekend.

''If the Jews go, there will be civil war here," she said, explaining that people are angry because only those with connections to the Palestinian Authority have access to jobs. ''Now, some people work in the Israeli settlements. If they [the settlements] leave, there will be no work."

Her husband, Hamdoullah Hassouneh, 50, agreed, although he said Palestinians would enjoy some symbolic happiness at the departure of Israelis from Gaza.

''Disengagement without providing jobs is a problem," he noted. Hassouneh said he lost his job in an automobile body shop on the border between Gaza and Israel last year when Israeli companies began vacating under Sharon's pullout plan.

Ephron reported from Netivot, and Barnard from Gaza City. Globe correspondent Alon Tuval also contributed to this report from Netivot.