More Israeli soldiers keep watch from a sandbagged machine-gun nest atop a fortified wall.
In the mainly Palestinian-run Gaza Strip, where about 6,500 Jewish settlers live among more than 1 million Palestinians, a siege mentality is already firmly in place in isolated communities like Kfar Darom, home to about 40 Jewish families. Now, as Palestinians embark on what they say is a final push toward statehood, many Jewish settlers are afraid that soldiers and sandbags will not be enough to protect them in coming months. After a two-day leadership meeting in Gaza, Palestinian officials set Sept. 13 as a target date for statehood, while leaving open the possibility of delays if a peace deal with Israel cannot be clinched by then. For the settlers, that ushers in a period of heightened uncertainty, raising the specter of a chaotic transfer of power in the Palestinian lands. Settler fears were fanned six weeks ago by televised scenes of Israeli soldiers in retreat from south Lebanon - in particular, by the sight of thousands of Shiite Muslim civilians surging into their former villages while occupying troops of Israel's allied militia threw down their guns and fled.