The journalists who wanted to enter Gush Katif on the morning of Monday, August 15 gathered at the Eshkol media center, near Ashkelon, on Sunday night. The place was packed with reporters from practically every country you can name - from South Korea to Abu Dhabi - but the very first person I saw was Rinat. She's in Neve Dekalim now, seeing everything first hand, and I am terribly jealous because I'm back in Tel Aviv and reduced to watching the evacuation on television.


On Sunday night the reporters at Eshkol signed up for various buses that were going to different settlements. The rules the army set were as follows: you choose a settlement, sign up for the bus that will take you there, and you stay there until the bus leaves. We were told that there was no option of travelling from one settlement to another but - as I later discovered - some reporters are more equal than others.

The settlements I visited in May and June were little suburban paradises of spacious private homes, lush gardens and large green parks. They were populated by solidly middle class families who were wealthy farmers or teachers, lawyers and architects. Most told me they had chosen to live in Gush Katif for the quality of life rather than ideology; with a couple of exceptions, they said they would not resist evacuation if there was really no choice.

Shirat Hayam was not like those settlements.

It was a collection of grubby caravans set up on a piece of beautiful beachfront property, just a few meters away from an Arab village. It was surrounded by a rusty fence, and populated by a small group of extremist families. Over the past month, the number of residents swelled from 40 to 150; the newcomers were religious right-wing teenagers from the more extreme settlements on the West Bank, from Jerusalem and from Brooklyn. They had pitched tents next to the caravans, and they were walking around barefoot, behaving as if they were at some bizarre happening - or a summer camp. For these kids, the summer of the disengagement was their Woodstock, and they seemed to be having a thoroughly good time.



We arrived at 5.30 am to conflicting, mute messages: there were rolls of barbed wire in front of the locked gate, but there was also a sign that said, in Hebrew, "I love you, my brother."




A few Israeli journalists had been staying inside for a couple of weeks, getting background and preparing for the big day. When we arrived, they were waiting. They ran up to the fence, pressed their faces against it and said mockingly, "We won't surrender! Tell them that the leftist Israeli media will never surrender! Oh and dude, do us a favour and organize some coffee, would you please?"


To be continued after I return from Gaza City on Thursday evening...