Israel evicts Jewish settlers from building

HEBRON, West Bank -- Israeli security forces swiftly evicted dozens of Jewish settlers from an illegally occupied building in this volatile West Bank city yesterday, ending a weeklong standoff that had threatened to spill over into broader violence.

The raid caught the settlers off guard. Only a day earlier, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had moved to block the eviction order. Settler supporters in Netanyahu's hard-line government condemned the surprise raid, a key political ally threatened to quit the coalition, and settler leaders vowed retaliation.

"He is expelling us from our property and land," said David Wilder, spokesman for Hebron's tiny, ultranationalist settler community. "We will be back in that building. It belongs to us."

Hebron, the traditional burial site of Abraham, the shared patriarch of both Jews and Muslims, is the only place where Jewish people live in the heart of a West Bank city. Arab-Israeli violence there dates back decades, and clashes are frequent.

About 850 settlers now live in Hebron in heavily guarded enclaves among 180,000 Palestinians. Hundreds of Israeli soldiers enforce a rigid separation between the two sides.

The settlers seized the home in an overnight raid last Thursday, claiming they had purchased it from a Palestinian landowner. But the military ordered them to leave the building because they had not received proper approval to live there.

After Netanyahu's call for a legal review of the matter on Tuesday, it appeared the evictions would be on hold. But government officials said Netanyahu's attorney general determined the home should be cleared out immediately.

Hundreds of police ringed the apartment building around midday yesterday. Settler leaders said about 70 people moved into the building last week, but only 15 or so, including children, were inside, police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who oversees the military occupation of the West Bank, promised to "continue to act to uphold the law and democracy while safeguarding the state's authority over its citizens." Authorities were still investigating whether the house was legally purchased as the settlers claim, Barak said.