UNDER the watchful gaze of Israeli soldiers guarding the Jewish settlements in Gaza from their Palestinian neighbours, cars packed with another kind of agitator drove in unchallenged last week.

The new arrivals are Jews of the extreme right, many of them Americans. They are the vanguard of a radical force building up in Gush Katif, a string of Israeli farming communities separated by barbed wire and army posts from 1.3m Palestinians who are crowded into Gaza’s refugee camps.

The Gush Katif farmers have lived in Gaza for decades and bitterly oppose the unilateral disengagement plan of Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, that requires them to leave their homes this summer.

The newcomers, who include students from the rabbinical yeshivas or religious schools, have vowed to stop the evacuation which the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) is expected to carry out in August.

They are very different from the Gush Katif settlers, whose opposition to withdrawal stems from their reluctance to abandon farms they built from sand.

The hardliners pouring into Gush Katif represent the biggest threat that the IDF will face on the day of withdrawal: unlike the settlers, they are preparing to use violence.

One of the young men building a “tent city” to accommodate the influx told me that he would not fire on a Jewish soldier, but he was prepared to shoot a Druse or bedouin. Much of the police force is Druse. Many Druse and bedouin serve in the IDF.

Some of the young men have already targeted Palestinians. If they provoke them into a revenge attack, they might even derail the disengagement plan.

So far, most of them are from the Lubavitcher, a wealthy messianic Jewish sect with its headquarters in New York. Money is pouring in from New York to fund them. In Gush Katif they live in a large tent and a red shipping container at Tiferet Israel, the site of a log cabin synagogue built four months ago on the outskirts of Naved Kalim, the largest Jewish settlement in Gaza.

The bronzed, muscled farmers of Gush Katif regard the pale strangers warily and have not offered to house them. Last week a bearded young man in the black fedora, black suit and cheap black shoes of the orthodox Hassidic Jews sweated in the Mediterranean sun as he lifted tent poles in shifting sands.

He was joined by 70 young men, mostly Americans but including some Australians and South Africans, all members of a Haifa yeshiva. They will study in the morning with their rabbi. In the afternoons they will work on a “tent city” to house thousands like them.

The new arrivals’ opposition to the disengagement plan is ideological. They believe that they are doing God’s work based on his promise of Gaza to the Jews. “This land is Israel and it belongs to the Jews because God gave it to them,” said David Nathonson, 23, who arrived in Israel three months ago from Brooklyn, New York, and has spent tens of thousands of dollars on preparations for the tent city.

“God can give it to whoever he likes,” he said. “Nobody in the world can take it away.”

Explore World News

• World Agenda

• Iraq News

• US & Americas News

• Europe News

• Middle East News

• Afghanistan News

• Asia News

• Africa News

• Ireland News

Times Recommends

• UN may halt 400-year-old 'freedom of the seas'
• Where the Rosetta belongs can’t be set in stone
• Gas deal on hold, but Ukraine may pay in the end