Gush Katif

As in daring situation assessments in distant places, the IDF and the police have obtained the floor plans of all the homes in the communities marked for evacuation in order to use them to break inside.

In the past, the IDF has used floor plans in cases where it was important to know the location of each room in the building so that they could take control of it as they did, for example, during the operation at Entebbe, and also during lesser-known operations.

Ma’ariv has learned that before disengagement, special efforts have been made to ensure that the floor plans of each home would be in the hands of the troops intended to break in. Incidentally, the task of obtaining the floor plans was not especially complicated since most of the homes marked for evacuation were built by the Ministry of Housing, which handed the floor plans over to the troops preparing for disengagement. Even buildings built privately were subject to due processes of approval and, therefore, the IDF and the police have floor plans.

The Israel Police have prepared the precise break-in plans for each home based on its floor plan. The police have prepared a file not only of the shape of the home but also the profile of each family living there and marked for evacuation. Meanwhile, the GSS has marked for the troops those homes where especially extreme opponents of evacuation might be found.

One can also learn how seriously the IDF and the police regard the operation of taking control of the settlement homes from the fact that before the final training, which will take place before the actual disengagement, a dummy settlement will be built on the Tzeelim national training base in which police officers and soldiers will practice the methods of action before the disengagement.

This piece ran in Maariv on April 20th, 2005