SOMEWHERE in the dark hours before dawn yesterday the last Israeli tank reversed out of its bulldozed position at Netzarim, or Elei Sinai, or Kfar Darom, and rolled out of Gaza, perhaps for good.

At 2am tracer bullets darted over Gaza City as Palestinian soldiers saluted the fires that were springing up against the southern sky. The settlements were burning; after 38 years of, at best, strained coexistence, the Israelis were gone.

In the first grey light before the dawn Ahmed Talalka was already exhausted. The unemployed 20-year-old sprawled by a path in what, until hours before, had been the Jewish settlement of Netzarim, an Israeli enclave inserted hard against the southern outskirts of Gaza City.

"When I got here it was 12.30 and already there was no one, so we went straight to the synagogue and set it on fire," he said.

"It was an illegal building on our land. The Israeli Jews [Did he really say "Israelly Jews"? Maybe. -Sol] don't respect anyone's religion but their own. I am very happy. The Israelis are out of here. We have more land and we got rid of the roadblocks."

Netzarim's synagogue was one of 25 in Gaza abandoned intact after the Israeli cabinet voted on Sunday to reverse an earlier decision to demolish them, as the Palestinian Authority had requested.

The cabinet was responding to pressure from rabbis.

Stripped of furniture and holy materials, the building did not burn well so, as the sun rose over the Mediterranean, a Palestinian bulldozer began clawing at its walls. A camera's flash brought dozens of troops and police crowding round the culprit.

"You can watch but you can't take pictures," warned a young army officer.

"This place is a problem for us. They (the Israelis) want people to see us destroying it, so it will look bad for us."

A few kilometres to the south, crowds of Palestinians were busy scavenging the ruins of Kfar Darom, an outlying settlement poking like a finger into the flank of the Arab town of Deir el-Bala.

One of the few women present, Ma'soud Aud'allah, 65, was tugging a bent girder from the bulldozed wreckage of a settler home. She did not call it looting.

"This is my land," she said. "My house was near the road and the Israelis destroyed it. I want to use this to rebuild my house. It will be a support for the roof."

As the day wore on, hundreds, and then thousands of people, mainly men and boys in this segregated culture, found their way to the beaches that fringe the western edge of Gush Katif, the southern block of Israeli settlements. Most had no swimming costumes, but stripped to trousers or underwear and jumped into the water. One was Mahmoud Fayad, who said he was 16 but looked much younger. He had come from Khan Yunis, two kilometres and — until yesterday — one impassible Israeli checkpoint away. It was his first swim in his own area.

"I'm enjoying it a lot," he decided. "It's nice and warm."

At Neve Dekalim, administrative centre for the south Gaza settlements, Bedouin youths from the nearby village of Muwassi — until yesterday an Arab enclave trapped inside Israeli lines — were frantically stripping the Star of David-shaped Yamit Yeshiva (religious college) of valuable aluminium fittings and copper wires.

Departing Israeli settlers had left notices in English and Arabic taped to the walls. "Holy Place", they said. Its new owners ignored them. At the back of the complex another departing Israeli hand had spray-painted another message. In Hebrew it said: "Bastards: Call me at …" and it gave an Israeli mobile phone number...