Israel on Monday completed its historic withdrawal from Gaza, ending more than three decades of settlement activity, and it prepared its final evacuation of two remaining West Bank settlements.

Less than a week after launching its pullout operation, Israel had swept through 21 Gaza settlements and two in the West Bank. It evacuated about 9,000 residents in all in a move the U.S. government hopes could revive the dormant peace process.

The last holdouts on Monday left the Gaza settlement of Netzarim, marching behind Torah scrolls. To the northeast, Israeli forces massed near the two remaining West Bank settlements. The Israeli government plans to tackle those settlements, Sa-Nur and Homesh, Tuesday.

Israel could encounter stronger resistance than it met last week from settlers in Gaza. There, Israeli security forces wrestled holdouts onto buses and made an unarmed assault on a synagogue roof, where resisters pelted them with liquids and vegetables.

Activists in this settlement hunkered down Monday to fight off Israeli forces.

Sa-Nur is anchored by a large stone fortress built by the British during their occupation of Palestine from 1917 to 1948. About 150 settlers have set up trailer homes around the fortress. The remote settlement has swelled to about 800 people in recent weeks, most of them activists who oppose the withdrawal.

The evacuation of the two militant West Bank settlements will be "more complex" than those in Gaza, Israeli Police Chief Inspector-General Moshe Karadi told reporters outside Sa-Nur on Monday.

Karadi referred to concerns that settlers here would hurl projectiles, pour acid on troops or torch the surrounding fields. Still, "the whole thing will be over today or tomorrow," he said.

In clashes Thursday in the Gaza settlement of Kfar Darom, more than 70 troops and police were singed by acid that activists poured on them.

"We are preparing for anything," police Superintendent Sharon Brown said Monday.

Displaced settlers are to get an average of $200,000 to $300,000 in government compensation.

Yigal Amitay, one of the leaders of the Sa-Nur activists, said, "I think we'll show stiff resistance but not violence." He said settlement leadership gathered activists' military-issued M-16 assault rifles and private handguns last week and handed them over to the military.

Activists prepared to barricade the fortress' stairwell to the rooftop to block Israeli troops, who were to arrive at dawn today.

The Israeli military and police bused and airlifted thousands of troops northward from Gaza on Monday to ensure a bloodless evacuation. Five miles south of Sa-Nur, in the Nablus-area settlement of Homesh, activists ringed settlers' homes with barbed wire, welded iron bars onto windows and prepared arsenals of insulating foam to spray on evacuating forces.

"We understood that we lost the battle" in Gaza, said Yedidiya Lerner, 25, who moved into the settlement a year ago "to strengthen it." He said the swiftness of the Gaza withdrawal is an "embarrassment to us. Now we have to show that it will be difficult to evacuate other parts of the land of Israel, that we will cling to the ground."

Lerner defended the tactics used by the most hard-core Gaza resisters. He said he does not view pouring motor oil or hurling potatoes and paint bombs at troops and police as violence.

Source: CD/Agencies