WHEN the Israeli soldiers come for Yehuda and Miriam Gross they will be long gone. It is a lesson they learnt more than half a century ago as Hungarian Jews when they were dragged away to Nazi concentration camps in the 1940s, then fled the newly installed communist regime in 1957.

Today, as Israeli settlers in occupied Gaza, the octogenarian couple face their third eviction — from the settlement of Neve Dekalim where they have lived for 18 years.

With disengagement less than a month away, they have decided that they are too old to remain with their children and grandchildren, who will resist the pullout. Instead, they will pack up the first home that they have chosen for themselves and move to the southern Negev Desert.

Mrs Gross said: “I have no strength for it. After going through the Holocaust I said to myself, ‘this is the last time that someone will order me to go’, and all of a sudden it is happening in my country. This is my land, where I’m supposed to have some power.”

Mr Gross added: “I don’t want to see this happen for the third time in my life.”

Both 83, the couple are hardly typical of Gaza settlers. In the red-roofed settlements outside their window, fierce skullcapped youths are preparing for a confrontation with Israeli soldiers who, in the middle of next month, will begin evacuating all 9,000 Jewish settlers from Gaza. From every car and lamppost flutter the orange ribbons of Israel’s disengagement opponents, whose supporters marched in their thousands on Gaza this week, only to be blocked by 20,000 police and soldiers.

Vocal and well funded, they are a powerful force in Israeli politics, but consistently a minority in opinion polls. Many are recent American immigrants, or lawless far-right extremists from the illegal settlements of the West Bank.

As she packs, Mrs Gross recalls how in 1944, when she was 22, Germans cleared her Hungarian village of Jews and took her to Auschwitz. She survived only because she was young and able to cope with the workload, but of her extended family — her mother had 11 brothers and her father ten — only ten returned from the death camp.

Mr Gross was held by the Nazis in a Hungarian labour camp where Jews were forced to clear landmines laid down by advancing Russian troops.

When they fled the communists a decade later they left behind a prosperous family textile business. In Israel they were settled in unfashionable Beersheva, where many immigrants were sent to Judaise the Negev. But Mrs Gross consoled herself with the thought that it was the last evacuation.

They have little time for the Holocaust comparisons being stirred up by anti-disengagement protesters outside their door, where opponents last year began wearing orange Stars of David and have recently begun writing identification numbers on their arms.

Mrs Gross said: “I don’t like them using the Holocaust. The ones who were actually there can’t make the comparison, it’s only the ones who weren’t. But I can understand the pain of those campaigners because they live in homes that they built over so many years.”

Ariel Sharon’s decision to evacuate the settlers from their isolated and razor wire fortresses surrounded by 1.3 million resentful Palestinians is supported by a majority of Israelis.But is it opposed by the Israeli religious and ultra-nationalist Right that scorns accords and peace treaties in favour of biblical texts in which, they say, the land of Israel was granted to them by their God.

But Mr and Mrs Gross are typical of another type of settler: those encouraged to move into the settlements by successive governments from the 1970s, chiefly those including Mr Sharon. They feel betrayed by the man who was long regarded as Israel’s chief settlement architect, but is a secular pragmatist who has dismayed rightwingers with his unilateral decision to relinquish Gaza.

His proclaimed aim is to sacrifice the 21 tiny Gaza settlements to tighten Israel’s grip on the much-larger West Bank settlements which, like their Gaza counterparts, also lie on land seized by Israel in the 1967 war and claimed by Palestinians for a future state.

Mr and Mrs Gross will receive £103,000 compensation, but fear that it will be eaten away by moving expenses.

Mrs Gross said: “The Government told us to come here. They gave us incentives, a mortgage, and now they want us out. It is a cold, calculating decision and we are the ones paying the price.”

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