MIDDLE EAST Gaza withdrawal plan revised to include 4 stages

The prime minister's original plan was rejected by his political party.
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) -- Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has revised a plan to pull out of the Gaza Strip weeks after his party rejected it, and now proposes a gradual process involving four steps, an Israeli official said.
Sharon was to distribute his proposal to members of his Cabinet today, ahead of a ministerial debate on the new formula Sunday.
The Israeli official, speaking Wednesday on condition of anonymity, declined to give details about the four stages.
In Gaza early today, three Israeli tanks and a bulldozer entered Palestinian territory outside the central town of Deir el-Balah and destroyed three Palestinian houses, witnesses and Palestinian security officials said.
The military said an operation was under way in an area where militants operate. The operation came days after the army ended a nearly weeklong offensive in the Rafah refugee camp in southern Gaza.
In the West Bank city of Nablus, troops demolished two houses of Palestinians involved in suicide bombings, the army said.
Reports on plan
Press reports about Sharon's revised "unilateral disengagement" plan indicate that the process would start with evacuating three or four isolated settlements in the Gaza Strip. That would be followed by removal of the other Gaza settlements, a military redeployment in Gaza and evacuation of four small settlements in the northern part of the West Bank.
The Haaretz daily reported today that the withdrawal plan is expected to be carried out by the end of 2005, a target date similar to the first plan. It also said details of the plan were expected to be presented to Jordan and Egypt today.
Sharon's Likud Party rejected his original plan -- which called for a pullout in one step -- in a referendum May 2 though the plan had U.S. backing, a stinging defeat for the prime minister. After the party veto, the "Quartet" of Mideast mediators -- the United States, European Union, Russia and the United Nations -- also endorsed the pullout plan.
Analysts say the revised plan will cause Sharon even more trouble than his original one, because opponents object in principle to evacuating settlements. They would just as vigorously oppose a blueprint for removing a few at a time as they would a one-step program.
Cabinet approval of the new plan is far from assured. Ministers from Sharon's Likud Party who grudgingly backed the plan before the referendum withdrew their support, saying they were obligated by the nonbinding vote. Party members turned the plan down by a margin of about 60 to 40 percent.
Mixed opinions
Agreeing to put a settlement removal plan to a vote before his party is considered one of Sharon's biggest political blunders. Although the Likud voted against it, public opinion polls show that up to two-thirds of the electorate as a whole support the proposal.
The order and exact content of the new plan is not known. Sharon has pledged to complete construction of a separation barrier along and in the West Bank before making any moves there, and completion of the barrier -- denounced by Palestinians as a land grab -- is about a year away.
Israel says it needs the barrier to stop Palestinian suicide bombers and other infiltrators who have killed hundreds of Israelis during more than three years of Palestinian-Israeli violence. Palestinians object to the route, which dips deep into the West Bank in some places to enclose main Jewish settlements.
Palestinians have been ambivalent about the proposal, demanding coordination with the Israelis over a withdrawal but welcoming, in principle, any Israeli evacuation of the Palestinian areas.