uk.news.yahoo.com/040914/325/f2lew.html
Click to enlarge photo JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel's security cabinet has approved cash advances to entice Gaza settlers to evacuate their homes, while police investigate death threats against Prime Minister Ariel Sharon sparked by his pullout plan. Tension has mounted in recent days with far-right opponents of Sharon's plan raising the spectre of violent resistance and the prime minister accusing them of trying to incite civil war. Sharon received a boost when senior ministers voted to budget $200,000 to $500,000 (111,000-278,000 pounds) per settler family on Tuesday as part of accelerated preparations to uproot all 21 settlements in Gaza and four of 120 enclaves in the West Bank by the end of 2005. He is counting on down payments, expected to amount to a third of the total compensation packages, to coax most Jewish settlers to leave voluntarily, avoiding clashes with soldiers. Hours after the security cabinet voted to budget $550 million to $670 million to compensate settlers, police said they had launched a "high priority" investigation into anonymous telephone threats against Sharon received at a Jerusalem office orchestrating the Gaza pullout strategy. Avraham Dichter, head of Israel's Shin Bet security service, said in July there were Jewish extremists who wished to see Sharon dead and were backed by dozens opposed to the Gaza plan. SECURITY ROUND SHARON TIGHTENED Since then security has been tightened round Sharon, once godfather of the settlement movement but now reviled as a traitor by some former followers for his plan to "disengage" from four years of conflict with the Palestinians by uprooting 8,000 settlers in occupied Gaza. In a new threat, a settler-rabbi, Yosef Dayan, told Israel's Channel Two television he was prepared to hold a mystical Jewish ceremony known as "Pulsa Denura" that would put a death curse on Sharon. Dayan, a former member of the outlawed anti-Arab Kach party, conducted such a ceremony before Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's assassination in 1995 by an ultra-nationalist Jew opposed to his interim peace accords with the Palestinians, media reports said. The rabbi's comments sparked outrage across the Israeli political spectrum and police said they would ask the Prosecution Service to advise whether he had broken the law. "We are dealing with a rabbi who has openly incited to murder the prime minister," Dalia Itzik, a legislator from the main opposition Labour Party, said in a statement calling for Dayan's arrest. Urging a non-violent struggle against Sharon's plan, the Council of Jewish Settlements in Judea, Samaria (the West Bank) and Gaza issued a statement condemning calls to harm him. The council said Sharon could calm tensions by holding a general election or a referendum on the withdrawal plan. Earlier, Sharon dismissed as a stalling tactic a call by Benjamin Netanyahu, his rival in the rightist Likud party, for a referendum on a Gaza pullout. Polls show most Israelis support Sharon's plan to evacuate Gaza's hard-to-defend settlements. His opponents say ceding land captured in the 1967 Middle East war would "reward terror". Many Palestinians see the plan as a ruse to hold on to large swathes of the West Bank, where most of Israel's 240,000 settlers live. An Israeli official said Israel's Galilee region and the Negev desert would be "priority areas" for relocation but settlers were free to move anywhere, including the West Bank.
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