Sharon: Gaza pullout to go ahead

? Settler leaders turned up the rhetoric Friday against Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, calling his plan to withdraw from the Gaza Strip and a small part of the West Bank a “Nazi act” and warning it could lead to civil war.

Sharon remained undeterred, saying he would push ahead with the plan despite the vociferous and potentially violent opposition.

In the Gaza Strip, a senior Hamas gunman and two other Palestinians were killed when Israeli tanks and helicopters fired at militants on the edge of the Jabaliya refugee camp.

Settler leaders charged Friday that Sharon does not have a mandate to carry out the withdrawal and said one consequence would be widespread refusal by soldiers to carry out orders for the mass eviction of settlers. Under Sharon’s plan, about 8,500 settlers would be removed from their homes.

“The other (likely outcome) is definitely a type of civil war,” Eliezer Hasdai, head of a regional settlement council, told Israel Radio.

Another prominent settler said Sharon’s actions were Nazi-like, in an echo of slurs against Premier Yitzhak Rabin in the weeks before his 1995 assassination by an ultranationalist Jew.

“In the last century, the only ones who expelled Jews because they were Jews were the Nazis,” Haggai Ben-Artzi, brother-in-law of finance minister and former premier Benjamin Netanyahu, told Israel Radio. “To anyone who does this I say this is a Nazi, anti-Semitic act.”

Sharon was not swayed.

“This plan will go ahead regardless, period,” Sharon told The Jerusalem Post in an interview published Friday.

Sharon also said Israel can continue building in large West Bank blocs without U.S. opposition if it does so quietly.

While the U.S.-backed “road map” peace plan calls for a settlement freeze, Israel believes it has tacit American approval for building within these blocs that it wants to keep in any future peace deal.

U.S. diplomats say publicly that Washington remains committed to the road map. However, Israel’s announcement last month that it would build 1,000 new homes in settlements near Jerusalem drew only a muted U.S. response.

“Yes, we can continue building in the large blocs,” Sharon said when asked whether he had a quiet understanding with the United States on limited settlement construction.

The issue of Jewish settlement construction is a major irritant in the complex relations among Israel, the United States and the Palestinians, who seek all of the West Bank and Gaza for their state.