On hilltops overlooking Palestinian villages in the sun-baked Samarian hills, with their swirling terraces of ancient olive groves, Jewish settlers yesterday made a final and fierce but ultimately futile stand against their government's plan for the first dismantling of settlements on land it has occupied for 38 years.
Fears that largely unarmed troops evacuating some 1,200 radical Jews in the northern West Bank settlements of Homesh and Sanur would be met with firearms and other weapons including Molotov cocktails and stun grenades proved unfounded.
While 8,000 police and soldiers clashed with extremist settlers who barricaded themselves into homes, synagogues and religious schools, yesterday's evictions brought to a relatively smooth conclusion a week-long military operation to remove 25 settlements from Israeli-occupied land in Gaza and the West Bank.
Army bulldozers cleared burning tyres and rubbish bins to make way for the well-drilled troops, who quickly took control of key areas of resistance in the two isolated settlements and had bussed out all the demonstrators by evening time.
Soldiers and police were subjected to intense verbal abuse, pelted with bottles, paint, ketchup, eggs and even bags of human faeces and urine thrown by extremist settlers, most of whom were not the original residents of the fortified enclaves which are surrounded by Palestinian villages.
After brief attempts to coax occupants from houses, public buildings and radio antennae, paramilitary border police equipped with riot batons, hard hats and Perspex shields used circular saws, pile-drivers and sledgehammers to batter their way into some homes, as well as two synagogues and a religious school, or yeshiva.
In Sanur, a former artists' colony, troops cut open the iron doors of a stone Ottoman-era fortress and carried out the settlers with their arms and legs thrashing.
Riot troops were crane-lifted on to the roof of the building in two steel containers, where they blasted protesters with water hoses and sprayed tear gas. Protesters were allowed to hold a brief religious ceremony before being bussed out of the settlement. In a separate incident in Sanur, a female soldier was slightly injured after a woman stabbed her with a Stanley knife.
In the larger settlement of Homesh, riot troops scaled the roof of a bomb-proof yeshiva, where they placed plastic handcuffs on struggling protesters and carefully placed them into the shovel of a bulldozer which lowered them to the ground. They then used bolt cutters and saws to enter the building and drag out 40 male demonstrators.