JERUSALEM - Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon met with soon-to-be evicted settlers from the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, after an Israeli was shot and wounded in the first violent incident in the occupied territory for weeks.
Sharon received about a dozen settler leaders from the Gush Katif settlement bloc in a bid to persuade them to leave peacefully under the planned Israeli pullout from the territory due to start in July despite fierce opposition.
"The discussion is very tense. Settler representatives expressed their sadness," National Religious Party MP Zevulun Orlev told public television after talks began.
"They still don't know exactly what the future holds, and Sharon listened to their grievances," said Orlev, who has been mediating between the prime minister and the settlers.
An aide to the premier said the meeting would cover the possibility of installing Gaza residents in a new town to be developed near Nitzanim in southern Israel.
Sharon, the settlers' one-time champion, has transformed himself into their bete noire by forging ahead with his plan to pull all 8,000 Jewish residents out of Gaza and parts of the northern West Bank by September.
Although he has overcome all political obstacles to the pullout, settlers and right-wing extremists have vowed to fight to the end, with some urging the army to disobey orders in a bid to sabotage the operation.
Newspaper reports said settler leaders were poised to ask Sharon for more compensation, even though the government has already set aside nearly one billion dollars.
Previous talks with settler leaders back in October ended badly, with them accusing the premier of dragging the country to civil war, and the community appeared divided ahead of Tuesday's meeting.
"Those taking part in this meeting are showing their weakness. They are being manipulated," Gaza settler Avi Farhan told army radio. "We refuse to speak with Sharon because we do not talk to the enemy, we fight it."
But another settler, Israel Hazit, said the meeting was aimed at opening lines of communication with the government.
"Our aim is to limit the damage if this ill-conceived plan is implemented," he said.
Israeli radio said about 1,000 of the 1,600 Gush Katif settlers could move to Nitzamin under the government plans but that the new communities would take about three years to build, so they would have to find temporary housing in the meantime.
Sharon's meetings with settler leaders come ahead of talks in the United States next week with President George W. Bush, who has given the Israeli leader crucial backing for his desire to keep control of large West Bank settlement blocs.
The two leaders are expected to meet at Bush's ranch in Texas on April 11, with the pullout topping the agenda.
In the first such incident in the southern Gaza Strip since Palestinian police were deployed there at the end of January, an Israeli was seriously wounded in a Palestinian ambush, although it was not immediately clear whether the victim was a settler or a soldier.
The attack near the Jewish settlement of Morag was claimed by the Committees of Popular Resistance, a militant splinter group made up of dissidents from both the mainstream Fatah faction and the Islamist group Hamas.
The principal Palestinian armed groups have been observing an informal truce with Israel since the end of January, a truce that was confirmed during intra-Palestinian talks in mid-March.
In the West Bank, four Palestinian policemen were beaten and detained by Israeli soldiers in Hebron as they directed traffic, with an Israeli military source saying the men were detained after refusing to leave an area where they were not allowed.
Meanwhile, a Palestinian teenager who was arrested for throwing stones at Israeli soldiers in the West Bank said he had been severely tortured by his interrogators.
Mahmud Radi Erakat, 16, denounced the alleged abuse in a sworn affidavit taken by a Palestinian lawyer who visited him Tuesday, according to prisoners' defence association the Prisoners' Club.
Erakat claimed that, among other tortures, he had been hung by his legs from a steel bar attached to the ceiling of his interrogation room and that a cord had been wrapped around his testicles and yanked.
No immediate comment was obtained from the Israeli army.
04/05/2005 15:49 GMT