Gateway: Firewall shutdown

I wanna establish a SSH tunnel from inside the gateway which is mentioned in Combining Tunnels with Tor
To do some tests i wanna shot down the firewall.
First i stopped TOR on the Whonix-Gateway.
To shut down the firewall i did the following with root privilege.
Iptables -F
Iptables -P INPUT ACCEPT
Iptables -P OUTPUT ACCEPT
The problem is that i cant establish a ssh connection. The error message i get is: Connection refused
It seems the firewall still blocks connections.
How do i solve this problem?

For firewall unload, try this script that I just now added to the wiki:

Use user clearnet, that is allowed.

Or allow in Whonix firewall settings to allow user “user” or user “root” to connect to clearnet.

Thanks for the fast response and for the script.
Will check it out later.