Using bulldozers and their bare hands, Palestinians began torching and demolishing synagogues across the Gaza Strip today, erasing the last remaining emblems of 38 years of Jewish occupation.

In Netzarim, just to the south of Gaza City, mobs of cheering youths set fire to the abandoned temple soon after the last departing Israeli soldiers closed the gates behind them at around 2.30am.

As dawn broke this morning, flames from burning buildings lit up the sky above several other of the 21 vacated Gaza settlements before demolition teams moved in.

"The Israelis destroyed our homes and our mosques.
Today it is our turn to destroy theirs,” said one man in Netzarim, who was hitting the building with a large hammer.

The scenes, accompanied by the smashing and looting of other ruined buildings, are likely to be repeated across the coastal strip in coming days. The Palestinian Authority ruled yesterday that it would destroy all of the 19 remaining empty synagogues.

Israeli ministers had initially sought to raze the temples with their own troops to prevent possible desecration but at the last minute bowed to pressure from leading rabbis citing Jewish law.

Palestinian officials then hoped to prevent the buildings from being over-run, aware that the uncomfortable images of their destruction would over-shadow the proposed celebrations.

"We don't want to be put in a situation that we are demolishing synagogues in front of the world," said the Chief Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat.

This morning, however, clouds of black smoke trailed across the sky above four of the abandoned settlements. The images were seized upon by opponents to Ariel Sharon's unilateral disengagement from Gaza as a portent for the Palestinian-controlled strip's relationship with Israel.

Silvan Shalom, Israel's Foreign Minister, said: “The world is looking to Abu Mazen to see if he can control this territory, and the anarchy that we could face today is not encouraging us for the future."

President Mahmoud Abbas, however, refused to be distracted from what he described as "a day of happiness and joy that the Palestinian people have not witnessed for a century".

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