While some residents hope for evacuation, others vow to stay on.

MEVO DOTAN, WEST BANK—"We're fed up,"taunted the sign in the house that had been abandoned for more than three months. Staring down onto Bar-Or Street from the second-floor window, the crudely lettered Hebrew looked as if it had been scrawled by the owners in a last-minute fit of contempt.

Even without the sign, the symptoms of attrition in this northern West Bank hilltop settlement are impossible to miss. The deserted streets are lined with overgrown yards and split-levels with windows shuttered tight.

Ariyeh Citronovich, a member of the settlement's leadership committee, watched it flourish in the 1990s. Now, strolling down Bar-Or Street with hands in his pockets, he describes an eroded community struggling to stay on its feet.

"This neighborhood was once full, but now it's at 50 percent," he says. "See the first house? That's empty." He gestures to the next dwelling on the block. "There's an empty house. ... There's my house." At the end of the street, he points out the sign in the window. "It's tough to see something like that. It's a shame. They're all friends who left."

The Israeli government says the number of settlers living in the West Bank and Gaza has surged, despite three years of violence with the Palestinians. But there are a handful of shrinking settlements like Mevo Dotan, where the number of families has dropped from about 80 to 40 since the start of the second intifada. These are also the kind of settlements that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has said he'll give up in his unilateral separation plan if the Palestinians don't come to the negotiating table soon.

Citronovich doesn't blame his friends who left. Like most of those who moved to Mevo Dotan after its founding in 1981, he did not bring the ideological or religious zeal of settlers in some other parts in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The secular Israelis here were attracted by government-subsidized housing, an intimate community, and the picturesque vista of the plowed valley below.

But ever since the outbreak of the Palestinian uprising in September 2000, Mevo Dotan has felt like a place under siege. There are army pillboxes around the perimeter of the settlement to fend off potential infiltrators from the Palestinian villages located less than a mile to the north and southeast. Few residents dare to leave the settlement without a military escort­—army jeeps depart every hour. The idyllic hillocks that attracted these Israelis to Mevo Dotan also offer cover to would-be snipers, making the residents harder to protect than settlers in the heart of the Gaza Strip, where the terrain is flat.

"It requires the deployment of a lot of army forces," says Citronovich. "There are soldiers stationed in the settlements. There are night and daytime operations in the field."

To reach Israel, residents must traverse roads that lead through Palestinian villages. Since 2001, three residents have been killed on those roads, each incident spurring a new exodus. Every month or so there's an ambush. In the last year, the settlement's psychological isolation from Israel became a physical reality when Mevo Dotan was left on the Palestinian side of Israel's infamous West Bank security barrier.

Mevo Dotan Chairwoman Yael Ben Yakov, a founding member, remembers when Sharon visited in 1991 to christen one of the settlement's neighborhoods. "He said settlements were not an obstacle to peace, but an obstacle to war." But last month Sharon said that he's willing to abandon isolated settlements that are costly to defend—an accurate description of Mevo Dotan and a handful of other settlements in the northern West Bank.