Hundreds of Israeli settlers and supporters prepared on Wednesday to battle a forceful eviction after Israel declared a closed military area around a house in Hebron, occupied in defiance of a court order.
The military decree followed violent protests on Tuesday involving settlers and their far right-wing supporters who hurled rocks at Palestinians, security forces, homes and cars and desecrated Muslim tombstones.
"The sector around the house has been decreed a closed military zone," a military spokesman said on Wednesday, saying Israelis are now barred from entering the Palestinian areas of the West Bank city.
Yet security forces did nothing to prevent hundreds of supporters from heading to the house in solidarity with the 100 or so settlers defying the November 16 High Court decision that the premises be vacated.
Nor did soldiers on the roof stop young settlers from hauling bucketsful of stones to the top of the house in preparation for an eventual confrontation.
"We will refuse any compromise. This expulsion is illegal," said David Wilder, a US-born hardline settler who acts as the spokesman for what residents call the "House of Peace" but is now better known as the "House of Contention."
"Thousands of supporters are on their way from across the country and we will stay till the end," he told AFP.
Caretaker Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made it clear the settlers will be removed from the house.
"Since the High Court ruled in favour of the evacuation, it will be evacuated," Olmert said at a ceremony marking the 35th anniversary of the death of David Ben Gurion, Israel's first prime minister.
President Shimon Peres said the Hebron incidents were causing considerable harm to Israel.
"Whoever throws as stone at a soldier attacks the state, and we cannot allow that," he said at ceremony held at the Sde Boker kibbutz where Ben Gurion is buried.
Twenty Palestinians and 18 Palestinians were reported injured in clashes that started on Monday night and continued on Tuesday.
Despite a significant police and army deployment in Hebron, including an observation post on the roof of the house and a roadblock outside, security forces maintained a low profile during the latest violence and similar previous incidents.
"The army and the police have thus far handled the violence miserably," said an editorial in the Haaretz daily newspaper. "With the police and army being criticised for weakness and the settlers preparing violent resistance, the evacuation itself will be very violent indeed."
The Maariv daily blamed military top brass "who are still engaging with the unruly mob with a craven political correctness" and the political establishment who "while away their time in sterile negotiations with people who play them for fools."
The settlers insist they have not only a God-given right to all of the biblical land of Israel, but that they are also legally in the house that a Jewish-American businessman claims he bought so more Jews can live in Hebron.
The original Palestinian owner denies selling the house, and the High Court has ordered the settlers out until ownership can be determined.
Settlers consider the house a strategic asset because it is about half way between Kiryat Arba settlement, home to 6,500 Israelis, and Hebron city centre where about 600 hardline Jews live under heavy military protection.
The settler presence in the Palestinian city of 170,000 has long caused tensions. In 1994 a Jewish extremist massacred 29 Palestinian worshippers at the Tomb of the Patriarchs, a site holy to Jews and Muslims alike.
The international community considers Jewish settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank to be illegal, and the Palestinians say they are the biggest obstacle to Middle East peace talks.
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