NISSANIT, Gaza Strip – One of Israel’s largest Gaza Strip settlements was a virtual ghost town yesterday.

With less than a week before the Israeli pullout begins, most residents have cleared out of Nissanit, leaving rows of abandoned homes and lawns littered with discarded furniture and garbage.

Israeli officials urged the thousands of settlers who remain to follow suit and leave their homes before soldiers come to remove them.

Tens of thousands of anti-pullout demonstrators gathered yesterday in Tel Aviv to denounce the impending withdrawal, the last in a series of large-scale protests in recent weeks.

President Bush endorsed the withdrawal in an interview broadcast yesterday on Israel TV. “The disengagement is, I think, a part of making Israel more secure and peaceful,” he said.

Israel’s prime minister, Ariel Sharon, repeatedly has said he will not back down from his plan to remove about 9,000 Jewish settlers from 21 settlements in Gaza and four in the northern West Bank in a massive military operation scheduled to begin Wednesday.

Many already have left.

Nissanit, a community of about 1,100 people at the northern edge of the coastal strip, was nearly deserted.

The furniture, windows, and even the red roof tiles had been removed from many of the houses, leaving them empty shells, their yards filled with boxes and broken hunks of plastic furniture. A small, pink bike lay abandoned next to one house.

Two women hugged and cried in the middle of the street. A few people filled pickup trucks with the last remaining boxes and chairs they needed to move.

Israeli flags, small signs of protest, flew over many of the empty houses, each marked with small “x” by the army. “Sharon is garbage; you destroyed our lives,” read graffiti on one house.

“It looks awful. It hurts my heart to see the houses like this,” a 30-year-old electrician from the settlement, Yossi Elus, said as he removed air-conditioners for his neighbors.

Though he deeply opposed the pullout, Mr. Elus did not want to risk losing up to a third of his compensation package by staying here in protest after the deadline, as the government has threatened. He packed up his family two days ago and moved them to a rented house in the nearby Israeli city of Ashkelon.

Eli Kabooli, 46, stood in his house, the floor littered with wires and white plastic molding, looking around for anything left to salvage.

His wife and two children moved Wednesday, but they only started packing a week ago.

“My wife couldn’t start earlier,” he said. “She’d pack and she’d cry.”

A small group of people who recently moved here to protest the pullout said they planned to stay until troops force them out.

Israeli officials do not expect strong resistance from the residents of Nissanit. Settlers in some of isolated settlements in central Gaza and the Gush Katif cluster of settlements further south are expected to be more problematic.

The military commander in charge of the pullout appealed yesterday to all the settlers to leave their homes quietly.

“After the 17th, the only thing left will be for them to fight with the army,” Brigadier General Dan Harel said.

In Neve Dekalim, with 2,700 residents the largest settlement to be evacuated, many of the stores in the town square were closed and the supermarket shelves were half empty. The town’s post office was closed and a sign on the door read: “The post office is closed in anticipation of redemption.” The settlement’s residents are Orthodox Jews.

A few people were packing their belongings, but most were expected to defy the deadline.

The settlement was crowded yesterday with hundreds of teenagers, many of them reinforcements from outside Gaza.

Police estimate that 2,000 pullout opponents have infiltrated Gaza in recent weeks and settler leaders have said thousands more were on the way. To prevent this, the army yesterday banned all visitors from entering Gaza.

Israeli and Palestinian Arab officials also are concerned that Palestinian Arab terrorists will attack soldiers during the pullout to give the impression they are driving Israel out.

The Islamic group Hamas agreed to cooperate with the Palestinian Authority in ensuring a smooth transition during the withdrawal, officials said yesterday, easing some concerns over possible violence.

A Hamas spokesman, Mushir al-Masri, said the sides “agreed on forming a committee to oversee the withdrawal and ensure that no one will benefit from the public properties, except the Palestinian people.”

“Hamas will not accept a marginal role in the withdrawal,” he added, while conceding the committee will “not be an alternative to the Palestinian Authority and will not run the Gaza Strip.”