Battle lines harden at the heart of old Hebron

HEBRON, West Bank, June 20 (Reuters) Nidal Awawi's narrow house in the heart of Hebron's old city is surrounded on three sides by Jewish settlers. The neighbours see one another but they do not speak, silent in their enmity.

The three-storey stone house, in the corner of an Arab souk, has been in the family since 1887, Awawi says, and used to be at the heart of Hebron's Palestinian community, the largest in the West Bank with around 150,000 residents.

Now the house, where Awawi lives with his wife and eight children, stands alone on the front-line of a standoff between the settlers, who number around 500, and the Palestinians.

What happens here hinges on Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's ''realignment'' plan, under which he intends to dismantle isolated settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and consolidate settlers in several large, well-protected blocs.

Olmert wants to revive peace talks before enacting the plan, but there seems little hope of that for now.

It is not yet clear whether the Jews living in central Hebron, who are among the most hardline of the 240,000 settlers in the West Bank, will be among those uprooted. Hebron, a flashpoint for the conflict, is holy to both Jews and Muslims.

For the moment, the government is adopting a tactical silence on such a potentially inflammatory issue.

Whatever decision is made will enrage one community: either the settlers will be up in arms at being removed, or the Palestinians will be angry that they are staying.

As they wait both sides are waging a strategic war; the settlers are trying to take over more homes as they expand their community and the local Palestinian authorities are moving more Arabs into the broken centre of the old city.

SHOWDOWN Awawi, 36, took over the family home 10 years ago. The first time his Jewish neighbours, who live about two feet from his bedroom, offered him money to move out was in 1998, he says.

''They said they would pay me 1 million dollars, but I refused,'' he said, sitting on his balcony where he has put up wire-caging to stop settlers throwing stones at him and his family.

His house is joined to a newly built settlers' building, where Israeli soldiers patrol the roof, sheltering from the sun under camouflage netting.

Two more offers, accompanied, Awawi says, by death threats, were made and refused. Some of his Arab neighbours did move out.

For centuries, Muslims and Jews lived side-by-side in relative harmony in Hebron, site of the Tomb of the Patriarchs, the place where Abraham and his wife Sarah are buried and a monument that is holy to Jews, Muslims and Christians.

That peace was shattered in August 1929, when the Arabs in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine went on the rampage, killing 67 Jews and wounding scores more.

The British removed the remaining Jews from Hebron. It was only after 1967, when Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan in the Middle East war, that they began moving back.

PULLOUT PLAN David Wilder, an American-born Jew with a pager and mobile phone on one hip and a pistol on the other, is now the official spokesman for the hard core of settlers in old Hebron.

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