Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the militant Palestinian groups, announced a three-month halt to attacks. After a day of internal bickering, Al Fatah, Yasir Arafat's mainstream faction, followed tonight with its own six-month cease-fire. 

The factions set several conditions for Israel, including a halt to its killings of accused terrorists and a release of Palestinian prisoners.

Though as skeptical as the Palestinians, Israelis hoped today that they might be entering a period of calm, or even nearing the end of what some Israeli commentators called, perhaps prematurely, "the thousand-day war," a reference to the 33-month conflict. Officially, however, Israel dismissed the cease-fire as a dodge to safeguard terrorists. 

Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian prime minister, had pursued the truce as a way to re-establish Palestinian security control without having to combat Hamas immediately, fearing that he lacked political support for that confrontation. He hopes that his support will grow as the Israelis relinquish what by previous agreement are Palestinian-controlled areas of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

"It's a beautiful feeling," said Fawzi Abu Jarad, 30, a local resident. He stood among a knot of men here tonight, solemnly watching as Israeli soldiers used chains and a hydraulic lift to hoist four waist-high concrete cubes that were blocking a road and load them onto a flatbed truck. "Our goal is not to see any occupation forces here, not to see any Israeli soldiers," he said.

There was none of the jubilation — none of the handshakes or hugging of soldiers — that accompanied Israel's withdrawal in 1994 from much of Gaza under the Oslo peace accord. This time, the Palestinians, like the Israelis, know from hard experience how quickly the fighting could start again and the soldiers and concrete blocks could return.

From the cockpit of an armored vehicle, a couple of soldiers waved before accompanying the truck toward a nearby military base at about 11:30 p.m. 

A lone, giant Merkava tank that was still blocking Salahadin Road, the major east-west artery here, then spun around and followed, its treads clanking and the glare of its white spotlight splintering in the dust-filled air, as though in a fog.

An element of theater accompanied tonight's withdrawal. Their M-16's were at the ready, but the Israeli soldiers were nevertheless unusually indulgent of Palestinian cameraman, who swarmed around them and their armored machinery. In the glow of their own camera lights, the journalists pursued the Merkava down Salahadin Road, pursued in turn through the shadows by a few Palestinian boys, one of them waving a Palestinian flag.

The journalists noticed the boys. Their bubble of light stopped, then moved rapidly in the other direction until it enveloped the children and the cameras could come to bear on the green, red, black and white flag.

Though troops had sporadically raided this area of northern Gaza for months, they had been stationed here for only about 35 days, residents said. Israel said its soldiers were trying to prevent Hamas from continuing to fire crude rockets over Gaza's fenced boundary at Israeli towns. 

Tonight, the army left behind a trampled landscape of uprooted orange orchards, smashed sewer lines and demolished houses.

The withdrawal from Beit Hanun was the first joint step under the terms of an international peace plan known as the road map, a step negotiated on Friday in anticipation of the truce. Muhammad Dahlan, the Palestinian security minister, and Amos Gilad, an Israeli general, agreed on how to begin putting the plan into action in Gaza. Field commanders met today to work out further details in the kind of pragmatic, face-to-face discussion that peace negotiators hope will rebuild trust.

A senior Israeli military official said Israel intended to move quickly to comply with its commitments, withdrawing more troops and easing travel restrictions on Palestinians by Monday or Tuesday.