The Israeli army has jailed 12 religious soldiers who refused to participate in the eviction of Jewish settlers occupying buildings in the mainly Palestinian city of Hebron illegally.

Police and border guards dragged more than 200 hardline settlers and protesters from the city’s central marketplace in a dawn raid involving 3,000 security personnel. Scores of protesters from extreme right-wing groups took up positions on nearby rooftops and pelted them with rocks, eggs and paint.

Fourteen policemen, four soldiers and twelve settlers were injured in the clashes and five settlers arrested. One protester shouted through a loudspeaker: “Forces of expulsion, God will punish you”, while others brandished banners vowing to return.

The jailing of the ten soldiers and two officers who refused to take part in the raid has caused shockwaves in this heavily militarised society, officially at war with most of its neighbours.

The settlers had been ordered by an Israeli court to leave the two-storey building in the marketplace, closed in 1994 after Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish extremist, shot dead 29 Palestinians at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron. Almost 40 soldiers threatened to refuse orders after being encouraged by family members and rabbis, officials said.

The 12 who carried out their threat were sentenced to a month in military prison and will be removed from their combat unit. It was the largest mutiny since religious soldiers refused to take part in the removal of thousands of Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip two years ago. “This is a dangerous phenomenon that threatens the very basis of the army being the people’s army in a democratic state,” said General Gadi Shamni, head of the central army command.

The refusal by the soldiers to provide a security cordon around the West Bank city centre was widely regarded as a message to the Government, which has stated that it would be willing to evacuate many larger West Bank settlements as part of a peace deal with the Palestinians.

That violent message came just a day after Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister, met Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President, for the first time in the West Bank to pledge his determination to push through a plan that could allow for much of the West Bank to be transferred to Palestinian authority, and for many more settlers to be forced from their homes in the occupied territories.

The religious settlers claim the right to live anywhere in biblical Israel, which they say includes the West Bank, known in Hebrew as Judaea and Samaria. The army mutiny has sounded alarm bells across Israeli society, where all young men and women except Arab Israelis and ultraOrthodox Jews are obliged to perform national service.

“Any state that wishes to live can have only one army. Soldiers are given orders from their company and regiment commanders only and not from any other person, as respectable as he may be,” Ehud Barak, the Defence Minister, said yesterday.

City limits

170,000 estimated number of Palestinians in Hebron 1,800 number of Palestinian businesses in the Old City shut down since 2000

500 estimated number of Jewish settlers living in Hebron

100 estimated number of Iraeli-built barriers in the historic centre of Hebron

80 per cent of Jewish settlers evacuated from Hebron in 1997 60 per cent of Hebron residents believed to be unemployed

Sources: Mid East Web; Temporary International Presence in the City of Hebron; Times archives

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