Two towns left to fully complete the evacuation

Israeli police are going to evacuate two most radical towns in West Bank. Security forces Monday emptied Netzarim, the last of the Gaza settlements. Israel completed a relatively swift pullout from all 21 Jewish settlements in Gaza on Monday.

The forces thrust into the Sanur enclave where hundreds of young settler radicals awaited them with iron rods and shields.

Security forces earlier entered the nearby settlement of Homesh, Reuters informs.

As Pravda.ru told a day earlier, there have been clashes between Israeli troops in the West Bank and Jewish settlers or their supporters. 12 people were arrested during the confrontations.

Settlers and their supporters have punctured tires, set fire to a military vehicle and an army outpost, as well as beat up a soldier in recent days, according to Naveh.

“The level of violence is not low and we must do our best to insure that it is not allowed to rise above this level so that we can carry out this operation with the minimum injury and damage to everyone,” Naveh said at a briefing for journalists at the town of Shaked just outside the West Bank.

About 240,000 Israelis have settled in the West Bank, compared with 8,500 in Gaza since Israel seized both territories in the 1967 war, according to Bloomberg. At Kadim and Ganim, two of the West Bank settlements slated for evacuation, about 50 families have already left voluntarily. There may be violence today when troops enter Sa-Nur and Homesh, Naveh said.

The U.S. has said it hopes Israel's withdrawal from all of the Gaza Strip, captured from Egypt in the 1967 Middle East War, and its transfer to the Palestinians will bring the two parties back to the negotiating table to discuss steps leading to the establishment of a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank.

The pullout is “brave and historic,” Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas told Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in a phone call last night, according to a statement from Sharon's office. Abbas said he hoped the pullout “would open a new chapter between the two peoples.”

The two leaders agreed to meet soon, the statement said.