On the morning of August 17, 2005, Israeli soldiers in green uniforms knocked on the door of a house in the settlement of Neve Dekalim. They were not there to protect the inhabitants but to remove them. This was the start of Operation Brother’s Keeper, the forced evacuation of all Israeli civilians from the Gaza Strip. Many settlers wept, prayed, or argued. Some teenagers had barricaded themselves on rooftops. The soldiers, many of whom were conscripts visibly uncomfortable with the task, carried residents out.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, a former architect of the settlement project, had orchestrated the disengagement. His government framed it as a unilateral move to improve Israel’s security and demographic future. The plan called for evacuating roughly 8,500 settlers from 21 settlements in Gaza and four more in the northern West Bank. The military had prepared for months, conducting sensitivity training and establishing temporary housing for the displaced.
The event is often remembered as a simple Israeli withdrawal. It was primarily an internal Israeli conflict. The Palestinian Authority had no role in the process. The images were of Jews removing Jews from land considered by many to be a biblical inheritance. The confrontation was ideological, pitting the state’s authority against the settler movement it had once nurtured. The Palestinian population of Gaza watched from a distance, their daily lives largely separate from the orchestrated drama within the settlement blocks.
The disengagement created a political shockwave in Israel that endures. It fractured Sharon’s Likud party and led to the formation of Kadima. It left Gaza under the full control of the Palestinian Authority, and later Hamas, which took power in 2007. The move did not bring peace or quiet; rocket fire from Gaza continued and intensified. It did, however, establish a precedent that settlements could be dismantled by Israeli decree, a fact that reshapes every subsequent negotiation about the West Bank.