As Avishai Nativ sat on his sun-drenched porch in the seaside Jewish settlement of Rafiah Yam, the driver of an armour-plated municipal bus slowed to shout abuse at him.

Nativ has upset some of his hardline neighbours by breaking ranks, seeking to take advantage of the Israeli government's offer of payments to leave voluntarily under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan to withdraw from the Gaza Strip.

"If Sharon has made up his mind, all I want is fair compensation and I'm ready to go," said Nativ, who has spent 14 years in the sprawling Gush Katif settlement bloc in south Gaza. "They can give this house to the Palestinians, for all I care."

While polls show most Gaza settlers fiercely oppose evacuation, settlement leaders are apparently worried about emerging cracks in that resolve after nearly four years of Israeli-Palestinian fighting, much of it centred in the Strip.

There is also growing divergence between secular settlers like Nativ lured to occupied Gaza by subsidised housing and an idyllic lifestyle and religious settlers who stake a biblical claim to land the Palestinians want for a state of their own.

When Nadiv moved from the Israeli port city of Ashkelon looking for work, he never expected he would have to carry a gun everyhere he went and still feel unsafe.

Now he and a small but growing number of settlers say they are tired of putting themselves and their families in danger.

Government officials hope that once secular Jews among Gaza's 8,000 settlers are enticed into abandoning their red-roofed villas and well-watered gardens for payments expected to average $300,000, much of the settler population will follow.

Gaza's 21 heavily fortified settlements are slated to be vacated by the end of 2005 under Sharon's "disengagement" plan, which supporters say will increase Israel's security but opponents call a "prize for Palestinian terror".

Polls show most Israelis willing to part with Gaza's hard-to-defend settlements.

"TRAITORS"

Escalating tensions spilled over last week when a crowd chanting "traitors" tried to disrupt a meeting at Nativ's house between visiting pro-evacuation campaigners and several settler families. Scuffling broke out and police were called in.

"They see those of us who want to leave as a threat, so they're trying to intimidate us into silence," Nativ said. His wife is hesitant to speak, fearing she could lose her job with the settler municipal government.

Gush Katif spokesman Eran Sternberg said Nativ wanted to evacuate to dig himself out of heavy debt, and denied threats against "the tiny minority who exercise their right to leave".

Despite that, leaflets appearing in Gush Katif this week branded Nativ and others willing to evacuate as "maligners of the Land of Israel" and urged fellow settlers to shun them.

The daily Maariv reported that teams of government property appraisers had begun touring Gaza enclaves in secret to avoid creating an uproar among settlers.

Nativ refuses to put a price tag on his assets, saying only he will demand the government take into account he will have to uproot his wife and three children and start from scratch.

He will not only be abandoning a two-storey ocean-view home but his business as well -- a down-at-heel pizzeria that sits just metres from a razor-wire fence separating Rafiah Yam from the Rafah refugee camp, a major flashpoint of fighting.