Word: gaza
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...Further down the Gaza Strip, the light orange stripes of open land become wider. This is the settlement bloc called Gush Katif, where most of the 10,000 Israelis due for evacuation live. Gush Katif is surrounded by scrubby dunes, guarded by tanks...
...entrance to all the settlements, except Netzarim, is the Kissufim checkpoint. It appears as we skirt the Gaza fence - not even Israeli military helicopters are allowed to fly directly above Gaza for fear of ground-to-air missiles. A single road to the settlements winds through groves of Eucalyptus trees. At the side of the checkpoint, there is a wide, flat, dusty square lined with armored personnel carriers and olive drab military tents. If protesters against the withdrawal get this far, the army needs to have enough soldiers here to stop them...
...getting this far wouldn't be easy. At each junction or side road for miles around, there is a checkpoint manned by police and soldiers. Residents of the area - including the 11,000 people who live inside Israel on the Gaza border in what's known as the Eshkol region - need special ID cards to pass the barriers. Anyone else is turned away, in case they're protesters hoping to infiltrate Gush Katif to prevent the evacuation...
...Eshkol has already set up three new villages in the Negev Desert to house settlers permanently inside Israel who want to continue living near their old homes a few miles away in Gaza. The council marked out plots and fitted a water supply to Shlomit, Halutzit 1 and Halutzit 4, which are each less than two miles from the Egyptian border. It'll cost each settler household about $40,000 to build a house there. The average compensation the government's paying each family of Gaza settlers is about...
...biggest of these caravilla parks is at Nitzan, a small town north of the Gaza Strip separated by high dunes from the aquamarine seashore. Some of its 350 caravillas are inhabited by the families who have already left the three non-religious Gaza Strip settlements along the north of the fence. These ?secular? settlers moved without a fight because they were for the most part originally drawn to Gaza by the economic incentives offered by the government for living there, rather than by the religious settlers' zeal to ?redeem? the Holy Land. From the sky, we see children's swimming...