THE Hebrew letters spelling out “A Land of Hope” are fading, and the rubble is being reclaimed by sand. As Israel prepares to withdraw from Gaza, the razed township of Yamit in northern Sinai is a foretaste of how the Gaza Strip’s 21 Jewish settlements will look in a few weeks’ time.

Here, a few miles west of the Gaza Strip, in April 1982 Israeli soldiers dragged away protesting settlers just as those soldiers’ children will be ordered this month to dislodge the next generation of settlers under Ariel Sharon’s disengagement plan.

The Egyptian Government granted The Times access to the now-deserted settlement on its northern Mediterranean coast, where Israel’s once-contentious Sinai settlements have quietly faded from memory and controversy over a quarter of a century.

The future of the 21 Gaza settlements is unclear. Some argue that Israel should leave the buildings intact for homeless Palestinian refugees. Israel has declared that it will bulldoze them — partly to avoid scenes of a jubilant Hamas dancing on the red settler rooftops.

But there are arguments over who should be responsible for removing tens of thousands of tons of rubble. The Palestinian Authority demands that Israel either clear or pay for the removal of its settler detritus, pointing out that the buildings’ asbestos content will make them useless even for landfill.

A quarter of a century ago Israel’s decision was unequivocal: dynamite everything except the synagogue. And that squat, gutted building covered in Arabic graffiti is now all that remains upright in Yamit, among the jagged landscape of broken prefabricated homes that lie beneath the Sinai sun.

Children play among the ruins and although the Egyptian Government does not allow the centre of the former settlement to be touched, local Beduin have begun reclaiming the outlying areas, planting almond and olive groves and tending fields that were once theirs, were seized by the settlers, and are theirs again.

“The settlers came before the war in 1973,” says Kamel Mohammed Suleiman, 76, who recalls Yamit’s barbed wire perimeter and two entrances, through which only children and adults with permits could enter. “It was our land but they took it, flattened it and kicked everyone out. If you didn’t attack them they didn’t bother you.

“We hated the fact that they occupied our land but there was nothing we could do.”

Then in 1982 20,000 helmeted Israeli soldiers arrived as part of Operation Red Dove to evacuate Yamit, at 600 houses and 2,500 people the largest of the 13 Sinai settlements known as Pitchat Rafich.

The soldiers used seawater hoses, foam, grappling irons, a scaling ladder and giant cranes to clear the diehard settlers who refused to leave, enduring a hail or bottles, poles and rocks hurled from rooftops by the most stubborn final 300.

• The 3,500 greenhouses attached to the 21 Jewish Gaza settlements will be destroyed rather than given to Palestinians after the breakdown of negotiations to agree a compensation deal, a settler spokesman said yesterday.

  The Palestinians refuse to pay compensation to the Gaza settlers. Hope of a compromise rose when the US Agency for International Development sought to buy the greenhouses for £9 million and transfer them to the Palestinians, 4,000 of whom are employed in them, after the withdrawal. The deal foundered.

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