But Arafat has done little to prepare the system he dominates for his demise. He wields unchallenged authority over every major institution — the Palestinian Authority, the Palestine Liberation Organization and an array of armed forces — through a system of loyalty, patronage and fear. He entrenched his control by ensuring that no potential rivals grew strong enough to challenge his authority, and no single figure is likely to emerge to replace him in those roles.

Hanan Ashrawi, a Palestinian M.P. and former peace negotiator, said that could produce “disorder, rivalries and vying for power” once Arafat is gone. “Arafat is a larger-than-life symbolic leader, which is a rare breed these days. He cannot be replaced,” she said. “You must remember that the situation in the West Bank and Gaza has been one of fragmentation and deterioration for a long time now. We cannot predict whether there will be further chaos and deterioration, or whether we will rise to the challenge in front of us.”

The political earthquake produced by Arafat’s death could open the way for a younger generation of Palestinian politicians intent on breaking with the authoritarian and often chaotic strategies of an administration run as a liberation struggle in favor of more structured and accountable government.

For a while before the latest intifada, the reformists and public opinion had Arafat in retreat. But he thwarted them amid the resurgent violence and the insistence of Israel and the U.S. that the Palestinian leader was the central obstacle to negotiation and had to be removed from power. That only strengthened his control.

Who — and what — emerges will play an important role in deciding whether Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, can maintain his position that there is no one to negotiate with and continue to pursue the “unilateral disengagement plan” that many Palestinians fear is a strategy to rob them of more land. “Arafat’s death will remove that roadblock,” said Barry Rubin, an Israeli biographer of the Palestinian leader. “The problem then becomes, Will there be a leader or leadership that can make decisions? There is going to be a power struggle, whether you have a leader who wants to make a deal, and whether he can make a deal.”

In the event of Arafat’s death, the basic law appoints the speaker of parliament as president of the Palestinian Authority for 60 days while elections are held. Arafat’s passing would also open a vacancy at the helm of the PLO. It is expected that the PLO’s secretary general, Mahmoud Abbas, would be its new leader. Abbas, who briefly served as prime minister last year, is likely to run for the presidency of the P.A. He has the support of many in the Palestinian parliament, and the Americans and Europeans, but lacks backing among the Palestinian security organizations. He may face challenges from younger leaders, such as Marwan Barghouti, the Fatah leader serving multiple life terms in an Israeli prison; Mohammed Dahlan, the former security chief in Gaza, who is favored by Britain; and Jibril Rajoub, Arafat’s security advisor.

In recent weeks, Palestinians have been registering in preparation for local elections in December and a presidential ballot scheduled for March. “If the law is followed, I think the change will be smooth and the Palestinians will choose a new leader who will serve them much better than Arafat,” said Abdel Jawad Saleh, a Palestinian M.P. and former cabinet minister who broke with Arafat because of the violence and corruption. “But there are other interests at work. The Israelis may not want elections because chaos suits Sharon. He can continue to say there is no one to negotiate with. If the Israelis are interested in elections and they lift the closure and the checkpoints and everybody can move, then I think there can be credible elections.”

But if the transition degenerates over the ballot — or the lack of one — it is likely that Sharon will keep up his mantra that there is no one to negotiate with. The Palestinian leadership and its rivals in organizations such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad say there is little appetite for civil war. But the Islamist groups may move to consolidate control of areas where they are dominant, driving out forces loyal to the P.A., which they view as a collaborationist organization.

How the P.A. evolves could have a profound effect on Hamas in particular. It has built a political base around the P.A.’s failings, playing on popular resentment of its corruption, inefficiency and the favoring of people and areas linked to Fatah in the delivery of services such as health. If the P.A. continues to crumble, Hamas will be strengthened. But if the patronage and other abuses are curbed, the Islamist groups will be undercut.

The real potential for bloodletting is settling scores against those elevated and protected by Arafat. The anger bubbling under the surface across the Palestinian territories burst to the surface in Gaza last month when the Palestinian leader attempted to promote a cousin, Moussa Arafat, to head the security forces there.

The Israeli military built the crossing without fanfare over recent months, along with other similar posts along the length of the vast new “security barrier” that is enveloping Jerusalem, while the world’s attention was focused on Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s removal of Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip.

But these de facto border posts are just one element in a web of construction evidently intended to redraw Israel’s borders deep inside the Palestinian territories and secure all of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and to do it fast so as to put the whole issue beyond negotiation. As foreign leaders, including Tony Blair, praised Sharon for his “courage” in pulling out of Gaza last month, Israel was accelerating construction of the West Bank barrier, expropriating more land in the West Bank than it was surrendering in Gaza, and building thousands of new homes in Jewish settlements.

“It’s a trade-off: the Gaza Strip for the settlement blocks; the Gaza Strip for Palestinian land; the Gaza Strip for unilaterally imposing borders,” said Dror Etkes, director of the Israeli organization Settlement Watch. “They don’t know how long they’ve got. That’s why they’re building like maniacs.”

At the core of the strategy is the 420-mile West Bank barrier, which many Israeli politicians regard as marking out a future border. Its route carves out large areas for expansion of the main Jewish settlements of Ariel, Maale Adumim and Gush Etzion, and expropriates swaths of Palestinian land by separating it from its owners.

In parallel, new building on Jewish settlements during the first quarter of this year rose by 83 percent over the same period in 2004. About 4,000 homes are under construction in Israel’s West Bank colonies, with thousands more homes approved in the Ariel and Maale Adumim blocks, which penetrate deep into the occupied territories. The total number of settlers has risen again this year — with an estimated 14,000 moving to the West Bank, compared with 8,500 forced to leave Gaza.

Israel is also continuing to expand the amount of territory it intends to retain. In July alone, it seized more land in the West Bank than it surrendered in Gaza: It withdrew from about 19 square miles of territory while sealing off 23 square miles of the West Bank around Maale Adumim.

Israel’s strategy is to “strengthen the control over areas which will constitute an inseparable part of the state of Israel,” the prime minister said after the Gaza pullout. Last month, he told a meeting of his Likud Party allies that it was important to expand the settlements without drawing the world’s attention. “There’s no need to talk. We need to build, and we’re building without talking,” he said. A few days later, one of the prime minister’s senior advisors, Eyal Arad, publicly advocated “a strategy of unilaterally determining the permanent borders of the state of Israel.”

The greatest impact of recent Israeli actions has been in and around Jerusalem, as Israel stepped up construction of the wall along the most controversial part of its route.

“What we are seeing is an acceleration of construction of the barrier,” said David Shearer, head of the United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Jerusalem. “Because of the barrier, Jerusalem is being sealed off from the rest of the West Bank. Movement in Jerusalem will be with a magnetic card and a sophisticated system of gates. The access the Palestinians have enjoyed to their places of worship, to some of the best schools, to hospitals, is now going to be severely restricted.”

The concrete wall through Jerusalem carves out Arab enclaves in the city, restricts the growth of non-Jewish neighborhoods and separates some 200,000 Palestinian residents from the occupied territories.

East Jerusalem will be further isolated from the rest of the West Bank by moves to link the city with the Maale Adumim settlement, using the barrier to mark out a boundary. The effect will be to entirely surround the Arab areas of Jerusalem with large Jewish neighborhoods and to push Israel’s frontier almost halfway across the West Bank, virtually severing the north and south of the Palestinian territory at its narrowest point.

Organizations such as the International Crisis Group say it could have potentially explosive consequences. “Current policies in and around the city will vastly complicate, and perhaps doom, future attempts to resolve the conflict by both preventing the establishment of a viable Palestinian capital in Arab East Jerusalem and obstructing the territorial contiguity of a Palestinian state,” it said in a recent report.

“The measures currently being implemented are at war with any viable two-state solution and will not bolster Israel’s safety; in fact, they will undermine it, weakening Palestinian pragmatists, incorporating hundreds of thousands of Palestinians on the Israeli side of the fence, and sowing the seeds of growing radicalization.”

In recent years, both sides have generally accepted that a negotiated agreement would leave the main settlement blocks close to Jerusalem in Israeli hands. Last year, President Bush wrote to Sharon assuring him that Israel would not be expected to return to the 1967 borders “in light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population centers.”

But Daniel Seidemann, an Israeli lawyer fighting legal cases over the barrier, said the government has worked to make those realities on the ground as extensive as possible while foreign governments shied away from criticism of Sharon for fear of jeopardizing the Gaza pullout. “It’s clear what’s happening. It’s clear the wall is used to designate the border that Sharon thinks he can get with the Americans,” he said.

Sharon appears to be counting on continued silence from America and European capitals because he faces a general election next year that Washington would like to see him win over his main challenger on the far right, Benjamin Netanyahu.

The Palestinian leadership believes Sharon has little incentive to negotiate because the Palestinians will not agree to surrender their claim to East Jerusalem or the large areas of land he wants to annex.

But Yossi Beilin, a former Israeli cabinet minister and a peace negotiator, said that a lack of pressure from Washington and other members of the quartet overseeing the “road map” peace plan leaves Sharon free to redraw Israel’s borders.

“The commitment to the road map is a big joke. It’s hot air all the time,” Beilin said. “I’m very pessimistic. I see the big gap between the speeches — how high the road map is on the agenda and how foreign governments say they have to deal with it — and nothing is happening on the ground. Nothing. Sharon just does what he wants.”

This article has been provided by the Guardian through a special arrangement with Salon. ) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005. Visit the Guardian’s Web site at http://www.guardian.co.uk.

Embittered Netzarim residents directed their ire at Sharon for going back on his word. In an attempt to reassure the Israeli right, the prime minister told the Jerusalem Post that he will continue expanding Jewish settlements in the West Bank, which are home to about 400,000 people. “There will be building in the settlement blocks,” he said. “Each government since 1967, right, left and national unity, has seen strategic importance in specific areas [in the occupied territories] I will build.”

The newspaper said Sharon specifically mentioned further construction in the Ma’ale Adumim settlement, designed to link it to Jerusalem despite Washington’s objections. He said that the Ariel settlement, in the heart of the West Bank, would be annexed as “a part of Israel forever.” The prime minister also said there would be no further unilateral withdrawals.

Sharon’s remarks come as he faces a serious challenge to his leadership of the Likud Party from Binyamin Netanyahu, an opponent of the Gaza withdrawal, in the run-up to next year’s general election.

Netzarim is one of the settlements most hated by the Palestinians. The tiny enclave, just south of Gaza City, severed the main road running the length of the Gaza Strip, forcing Palestinians onto a coastal path under the guns of the Israeli military watchtowers. More than 100 Palestinians have been killed from the towers or army posts in the settlement, including 17 ages 15 years or younger.

Netzarim swallowed up swaths of Arab agricultural land and was responsible for the demolition of scores of Palestinian homes in the name of security for Jewish settlers. The colony was also controversial among Israelis. Seventeen soldiers have been killed in recent years defending just a few hundred residents, a price many Israelis felt was too high.

But Shlomit Ziv, a teacher and mother of eight children who has lived in the settlement for 13 years, says not. “Are we to say that we should not defend a part of Israel because soldiers are killed?” she said. “No one is happy to be living under terror, but the value of the place is worth it. The people of Netzarim suffered from terror because we believed that even if it’s hard, that’s what God wants.”

The police commander overseeing Monday’s pullout, Brig. Gen. Hagai Dotan, saw it differently. “It’s so far away and they need the army to protect them. It’s a burden on the army. There is a big disagreement in Israel about this place. Do we really need the place and so many soldiers to guard it?” he said. “Personally I think [the withdrawal] is a victory for democracy in Israel.”

As the pullout from Netzarim began Monday, one Israeli family hung a Palestinian crest on its door under a sign reading: “Soldiers of Zion, you are creating a Palestinian country.”

Netzarim’s residents went quietly after a service of mourning in the synagogue. They boarded buses to Jerusalem to pray before moving to temporary accommodation in the student dorms of Ariel settlement’s college.

Monday night, 40,000 Hamas supporters celebrated the withdrawal at a rally in Gaza City, and the militant group vowed to continue fighting Israel until it pulls out of all occupied territory. Ismail Haniyah, a Hamas leader, told the crowd: “Gaza will be the first brick in the building of the Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.”

So far, several hundred settlers have left Gaza, mostly from smaller communities, although many more are preparing to go. Starting Monday, soldiers and police officers will go from door to door to attempt to persuade the rest to leave.

Col. Erez Katz, the officer overseeing the pullout on the ground, said he believes a good proportion of families have chosen to stay beyond the deadline to register their defiance, but that many will load up their cars and drive away before the removal squads arrive, particularly those parents who do not wish to be arrested in front of their children. “They will have registered their protest by staying on after the deadline, and if they leave in [the next] 48 hours they will not lose any of the compensation,” he said.

But a hardcore is expected to remain beyond Wednesday. In Gush Katif, the largest settlement block, local leaders say they will lock the gates to the settlements Monday morning and have called for a mass turnout to block roads to prevent what the army has named Operation Brotherly Hand from getting off the ground. It may also prevent some of those who want to leave from doing so.

The Gaza settlers who plan to hold out have been joined by several thousand supporters from Jewish colonies in the West Bank, or from Israel proper, many of them young people whose fervor has been sharpened by the closure deadline’s coinciding with Tisha B’av, the most mournful day in the Jewish calendar, marking the destruction of the ancient temples in Jerusalem.

The army has not said which settlement will be cleared first, but the approach will be the same in all. On the morning of the forced evacuation, the targeted settlement will be surrounded by six rings of security forces. The first will ensure that roads are kept open to allow in the second wave, assigned to clear the colony house by house. The remaining rings will protect the evacuation from Palestinian attack and seal off a wide area around the Gaza Strip to keep Israeli protesters at bay.

Each of the squads assigned to clear houses is made up of a combination of 17 soldiers and police officers. A policeman will knock on the door of each home, inform the residents that they are breaking the law and ask them to board a bus. They will be permitted a few minutes to gather belongings.

The approach, the army says, is to be understanding — firm but kind, a side of the Israeli military rarely seen by Palestinians in the neighboring Khan Yunis or Rafah refugee camps, who are routinely ordered through the loudspeaker of an armored vehicle to get out of their home minutes before it is bulldozed.

“We will show all the sensitivity that a family forced to leave its home deserves,” said Col Katz.

The squads have been practicing for weeks what will happen if the residents refuse to move. Adults will be pinned down, with one soldier or policeman on each limb, and lifted out. Only female soldiers and police officers will arrest women or carry children onto the bus.

The authorities believe the settlers have prepared several tactics to resist, such as retreating to one room, sitting on the floor and clinging tightly to each other. Others may barricade themselves in. If so, the squads will go through the windows or hammer their way through the walls.

Through all of this, the settlers are likely to appeal to the soldiers and police officers not to carry out their orders. “Jews don’t evacuate Jews” is a common plea.

The removal squads will not be armed, and several of the settlements have responded to appeals from the military to hand in their weapons. At the first sight of a gun, the process will be halted and a special negotiating team brought in.

“Even though we simulated some extreme scenarios, we believe most settlers will not resort to violence. Some of them are even waiting for the soldiers with cakes and sweets,” said Col Katz.

The army has developed an alternative to rubber bullets, which sometimes kill, by developing rounds using compressed sand that are not nearly so dangerous.

Although some smaller settlements, such as Kfar Darom, are generally the most militant, the hardest to clear may prove to be Neve Dekalim, the largest in Gaza. It is normally home to about 2,600 people, but the number may have doubled or trebled with an influx of evacuation opponents. Groups such as Land of Israel Loyalists have prepared for a long siege “against the expulsion and transfer plot” with stockpiles of food.

Some of the settlers and their supporters are expected to retreat to the roofs of their homes, or the top of the few multistory buildings, such as council offices and a large religious school in Neve Dekalim. The military considers it dangerous for both sides to have to drag resisters down stairs, so they will be forced into large yellow cages lowered onto the rooftops, locked in and swung into the arms of police waiting on the ground.

If the confrontation gets really difficult — with the only road out of Gush Katif blocked by mass demonstrations — the security forces have laid plans to move the settlers out by sea, using hovercraft and military landing craft.

There are other potential complications. Rocket attacks by Hamas or Islamic Jihad would probably bring the evacuation to a halt, particularly if a settler, soldier or police officer were killed. If that happens, the army has threatened to launch an offensive to seize control of Palestinian territory in Gaza, probably delaying the evacuation by days.

Once the settlers have gone, the dead will follow. Col. Katz said that under religious law, the 48 people buried in the local graveyard can only be disinterred and moved after the living have left.

The contents of homes will be locked in containers and shipped to a location in the Negev Desert for collection. Squads will move in to dismantle the parts of the houses that can be removed, such as water tanks and solar panels, and remove the asbestos found in many of the homes. Diggers will cave in the roof of each home to make it uninhabitable, but the bulk of the destruction and removal of the rubble will be left to the Palestinians, who are keen to use it to provide work.

Synagogues, religious schools and other sensitive buildings will be dismantled as far as possible — with roofs, door frames and windows removed. Other public buildings, such as administration offices, will be left for the Palestinians.

When the settlers are finally gone, along with the last of the bulldozers, the remaining soldiers will gather beneath the Israeli flag. The national anthem will be played, the Star of David will be lowered and the Israelis will leave Gaza after a presence that some never imagined would go on so long, and others thought would go on forever.

Abbas added: “We should [after the Gaza pullout] immediately move to permanent-status negotiations to deal with the issue of East Jerusalem, the capital of the future state of Palestine, and the issues of refugees, borders and water.”

Bush said, “We have reached a moment of hope” and “a great achievement of history is within reach: the creation of a peaceful democratic Palestinian state.” He added: “I believe the Palestinian people are fully capable of justly governing themselves in peace with their neighbors. I believe the interests of the Israeli people would be served by a peaceful Palestinian state. And I believe now is the time for all parties in this conflict to move beyond old grievances and act forcefully in the cause of peace.”

Bush added: “With concrete actions by the United States, the Palestinians, Israel and other nations, we can transform this opportunity into real momentum.”

But while Bush praised Mr Abbas as a “man of courage” and applauded his “rejection of terrorism,” he signaled that, like the Israeli government, he sees no urgency to return to the U.S.-led “road map” peace plan. “The imminent Israeli disengagement from Gaza and parts of the West Bank presents an opportunity to lay the groundwork for a return to the road map,” he said.

Bush has previously said that he envisages the creation of a Palestinian state by the time he leaves office in January 2009.

Thursday, he indicated that before there is movement on other issues, the Palestinian leadership will be judged by how it handles the governance of the Gaza Strip after the Israeli withdrawal in the autumn.

Abbas said he had told Bush that the continued expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and the construction of the vast steel and concrete barrier through the territory were undermining the prospects of creating a viable Palestinian state as well as contributing to frustration and despair among ordinary Palestinians. “We stress that democracy cannot flourish under occupation and in the absence of freedom,” said Abbas.

Bush called for Israel to alleviate Palestinian suffering, and he reminded Ariel Sharon’s government of its road-map obligations to cease the relentless expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. “Israel should not undertake any activity that contravenes road-map obligations or prejudices final-status negotiations with regard to Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem. Therefore Israel must remove unauthorized outposts and stop settlement expansion,” said Bush.

“The barrier being erected by Israel as part of its security effort must be a security rather than a political barrier, and its route should take into account, consistent with security needs, its impact on Palestinians not engaged in terrorist activities.”

Bush has given similar warnings in the past, but they have done little to stop continued settlement construction. And Sharon has failed to fulfill commitments to the U.S. president to dismantle Jewish outposts in the West Bank.

At one hospital, staff pierced children’s eardrums to apply an experimental medication yet to be approved in any country. At another, patients with senile dementia had their thumbprints applied to consent forms for experimental drugs.

Israel’s health minister, Dan Naveh, said he was “shocked” at what he described as a failure of his department and some of Israel’s hospitals. Jacques Michel, the former director of Hadassah Hospital who triggered the comptroller’s inquiry with a public warning about the abuses in 2001, Tuesday called for the prosecution of the doctors.

“These doctors should be punished very severely because they really are criminals,” said Michel, who is head of the committee that approves medical experimentation at Hadassah, which is not among the accused hospitals. “They should be stripped of their licenses to practice and they should be prosecuted. If you don’t show by example that the medical profession does not accept this kind of conduct, the phenomenon will go on and on. It’s not an isolated phenomenon. It spread through different institutions.”

The state comptroller, Eliezer Goldberg, found that patients were often not properly informed about the experiments they were agreeing to and, in some cases, not told at all.

Every Israeli hospital has a medical ethics committee to oversee adherence to the 1964 Helsinki code on experimentation. But the comptroller said the committees routinely failed to apply their own regulations and that the Health Ministry was negligent in enforcing standards.

Goldberg described a series of incidents at Harzfeld geriatric hospital as “extremely grave,” including the cases of a 101-year-old woman and another age 91 who supposedly consented to experimental drugs without their families being informed. Researchers applied the thumbprints of seven other patients at Harzfeld to consent forms that they were too senile to read or sign. “At this age, 25 to 30 percent of these people are not fit to give informed consent because they suffer from dementia or senility,” said Michel. In other cases, doctors were unable to produce the consent forms that they said patients had signed, although the law requires researchers to keep the documents for 15 years.

Kaplan Hospital conducted painful clinical trials on patients to draw urine samples by needle, a procedure normally reserved for extreme circumstances. The comptroller found that 40 percent of the patients who signed consent forms — five of them with a fingerprint — were mentally unfit to do so.

Goldberg said two women died from infections, but their deaths were not reported to the ministry, nor was a legally required investigation committee set up. The comptroller said that in some cases the deaths of patients who were part of clinical trials were not immediately reported, which undermined attempts to establish whether the experiments were to blame.

Michel believes some doctors bowed to incentives from pharmaceutical firms to test experimental drugs. “I don’t have to explain the enormous power of the pharmaceutical industry to direct research according to its priorities,” he said.

Goldberg described how one researcher was also the medical director of a company that initiated the clinical trial he was responsible for.

The Health Ministry said it has already taken steps to tighten supervision following the comptroller’s report.