NETZARIM, Gaza Strip – The last Jewish settlers left Gaza yesterday aboard armored buses for Israel, ending decades of turbulent occupation long denounced as a stumbling block to peace in the Middle East.

As the holdouts of Netzarim mourned, thousands of Israeli troops surrounded two settlements in the West Bank, where about 2,000 extremists have holed up with an arsenal of stun grenades, gas canisters, and automatic weapons, defying orders to leave. Troops were due to move into the West Bank settlements after dawn today, the next operation of Prime Minister Sharon’s plan to “disengage” from the Palestinian Arabs.

Mr. Sharon and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas had a five-minute phone conversation yesterday evening to discuss the Israeli pullout, and each expressed his commitment to peace, a senior Palestinian Arab negotiator, Saeb Erekat, said. It was their first conversation since a June 21 meeting in Jerusalem.

In the final day of the evacuation of Jewish settlers from Gaza, dozens of Netzarim’s families prayed in the community’s synagogue, weeping uncontrollably as the Torah scrolls were taken from their ark for the last time. They then held their farewell procession.

One family was left behind, spending last night alone in their house after every neighbor had left. A primary school teacher, Hanan Visner, said the army overlooked his house and did not knock on their door until it was too late to move him and his 11 children. The family plans to leave today with Israeli troops.

Mr. Visner, 47, said leaving Gaza was especially wrenching because of the sacrifices his family experienced. His father was fatally stabbed three years ago by a Palestinian Arab in the synagogue. His wife’s sister was killed in another settlement by a mortar shell fired by Palestinian Arab terrorists.

Mr. Abbas said Israel’s unilateral withdrawal was only the first step.

“Tomorrow they will start leaving part of the West Bank,” Mr. Abbas told a group of 400 Palestinian Arabs disabled in uprisings against Israel. “It’s a beginning of the full withdrawal from all the settlements. We will not close our eyes. We will not rest until they leave from all our land.”

But Mr. Sharon, who concluded that the Gaza settlements were too difficult to defend and that keeping Gaza posed a threat to the Jewish character of Israel, said he intended to keep building Jewish homes in the West Bank.

At a meeting of parliament’s security committee, Mr. Sharon said Israel would create territorial contiguity between Israel’s internationally recognized border and the areas that house most of the 230,000 West Bank settlers – a plan that likely would expand the West Bank’s Jewish population.

The prime minister said the Palestinian Arabs must respond to the Gaza pullout by disarming terrorist factions and reforming their own government.

But while Mr. Sharon won praise for the orderly evacuation of Gaza, international peace negotiators and the Palestinian Arabs have said any expansion of West Bank settlements would violate the American-backed “road map” peace plan, which calls for the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Meanwhile, the army braced for potential violence in the West Bank, which many nationalist Israelis consider the heart of the biblical Land of Israel.

In the most hard-line West Bank settlement earmarked for evacuation, Sanur, young men welded bars onto the open windows of an old British building known as “the fortress,” getting ready to make a stand against soldiers. On the roof, settlers flew a hand-painted Israeli flag from a refugee boat that in 1947 tried to break the British blockade of pre-independence Israel. A sign under the flag said: “The British didn’t succeed in expelling. And you?”

In a second day of clashes, about 70 extremists tussled with soldiers at the nearby settlement of Kedumim after staging a protest at a road junction. News reports said 12 people were arrested.