Sharon party rejects his Gaza plan - exit polls

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's party overwhelmingly rejected his US-backed Gaza pullout plan yesterday, exit polls showed, inflicting a stinging defeat that could trigger political crisis.

The "no" vote in Mr Sharon's right-wing Likud may have been boosted by rank-and-file outrage over an ambush just hours earlier in which Palestinian gunmen killed a pregnant Jewish settler and her four daughters in the Gaza Strip.

Israel struck back swiftly, launching an air strike on a Hamas target in Gaza city. Four militants were killed by helicopter-launched missiles in the West Bank city of Nablus, medics and Palestinian officials said.

Television polls projected Sharon losing the vote by a roughly 60 to 40 per cent margin despite US President George W. Bush's endorsement of his strategy of "disengagement" from the Palestinians.

The outcome of the vote in the traditionally pro-settler Likud, still subject to an official ballot count, could jeopardise Mr Sharon's plan and leave him vulnerable to a party leadership fight. It will also further muddy the waters of Israeli-Palestinian relations.

"We succeeded in persuading the Likud to remain true to its principles," said Likud cabinet minister Uzi Landau, one of the leaders of the opposition to the Sharon plan.

But the Palestinian Authority, which sees Mr Sharon's initiative as a ruse to trade Gaza for large swathes of the West Bank that they want for state, rejected the vote, saying the Likud had no right to decide on Palestinians' fate.

Polls in the final run-up to the vote had predicted it would go against Mr Sharon, and yesterday's ambush of a car carrying a a settler family may have further hardened opposition to his plan.

The attack was also likely to reinforce the opinion of most Israelis that the price of keeping 7,500 settlers in hard-to-defend enclaves among 1.3 million Palestinians in the seaside strip is too high.

The Likud referendum was not binding and Mr Sharon had vowed that even if he lost among the party's 193,000 voters, he would ultimately present the plan to parliament where he would have a greater chance of winning approval.

But Mr Sharon is all but certain to be weakened politically after failing to quell a rebellion by hardline party members unwilling to give up an inch of land captured in the 1967 Middle East war.