JEWISH settlers have gone but there are still a few people to be evacuated from Gaza, helped by Israeli soldiers to pack their belongings into shipping containers and to pitch the army marquees that will serve as home for the coming months.

But for these Arab families from Dahaniya — the “village of traitors” — the Israeli troops had to do little of the coaxing and cajoling that characterised the eviction of the 9,000 Jews. The 250 villagers, a mix of Egyptian Beduin and Palestinians stigmatised as Israeli collaborators, went to the High Court in Jerusalem to ensure that they were not left behind to an uncertain fate.

Haim Mendelbaum, their lawyer, said: “These people didn’t feel safe or secure. They felt if they had to go to Gaza City their lives would certainly be at risk. It’s well known that Palestinians see them as collaborators. No doubt most of them or their parents were informants and, with the anarchy in Gaza, they wouldn’t have got a fair trial on the Palestinian street.”

Israel did not believe so. It had stationed a garrison of soldiers in the tatty village of shanties to guard the inhabitants, cut off from the rest of the Gaza Palestinians by a high fence. The village, next to Rafah in southern Gaza, appears on no maps.

Few of the inhabitants had dared to cross into the Palestinian areas of Gaza for more than a decade, since a woman who went shopping was kidnapped and held for a month, blindfolded and beaten as she was interrogated.

The village, near the defunct Gaza international airport, gained its dubious reputation after Israel moved in West Bank collaborators whose cover had been blown during the first Palestinian uprising, which broke out in 1987. Villagers from Rafah were first moved there, too, in 1972 after Israel occupied Gaza. Palestinian collaborators, part of a vast network operated by the Israeli Shin Bet internal security service, are bribed or blackmailed to inform. When caught, traitors are tortured then killed in town squares.

Israel has given 1,200 collaborators new lives and new identities outside the Palestinian territories. However, Shlomo Dror, an Israeli Defence Ministry official, said that although the stigma remains, the last had left Dahaniya in 1996.

A high-level committee of the Israeli Army and the authorities responsible for the Gaza withdrawal decided that those from Dahaniya should be given the same compensation as evicted Jewish settlers, totalling £200,000 for some families. Even those of the 120 people who decided to take the risk and stay in Gaza are to get the compensation, along with the 250 who yesterday began setting up new lives in the Negev desert near Tel Arad village.

“We felt an obligation,” Mr Dror said as he supervised troops helping the arrivals. “These villagers are our responsibility. They will all have plenty of money to start a new life in Israel.”

But Mr Dror does not believe that most of the village families would have been at risk from fellow Palestinians, even though more than half the population had not risked testing his confidence. Certainly three families opting for Israel had received death threats.

Amid clouds of dust swirling in broiling desert sun, yesterday’s start was inauspicious. With no electricity and only portable lavatories, the “village of traitors” had swapped palm-fringed sand dunes for something less glamorous.

Shtiwe Shtiwe Ermillat, headman of Dahaniya, was struggling to come to terms with the lost idyll, despite the looming prospect of a healthy bank balance. “We deserve all of this, as full citizens of Israel and a normal life,” he said. “Those who are accused of helping the state of Israel were in a minority and moved away long ago.”

DESERT PEOPLE

Beduin men are recognised by their white traditional headgear

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