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CNN –
The Israeli soldiers stand with rifles in their hands, arms over shoulders, and speak into the camera. Behind it lies the shell of a building in Gaza.
“We are here to add light after the black Sabbath that the people of Israel had,” says one of the men in the video circulating on Telegram. “We occupy, deport and settle. Occupy, deport and settle down. Did you hear that, Bibi? Occupy, deport and settle.”
As Israel's war against Hamas enters its fourth month, the Israeli government has said little of substance, at least officially, about its plans for the postwar Gaza Strip.
Hamas took control of the territory – home to about 2.2 million Palestinians – from the Palestinian Authority in 2007, two years after Israel unilaterally withdrew all of its troops and about 8,000 Jewish settlers. Who will govern it after Israel's war against Hamas ends is an open question.
Social media
One photo shows soldiers posing with an orange banner that reads: “Only a settlement would be considered a victory!” The color orange was used by the settler movement in 2004 and 2005 to protest Israel's withdrawal from Gaza.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected the idea of establishing Jewish settlements, saying only that neither Hamas nor the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority should govern the area and that Israel would retain “full security control.”
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, a member of Netanyahu's right-wing Likud party, has released his own proposal, saying there should be “no Israeli presence in Gaza” but giving no detail on what governance there would look like .
Into this gap has stepped a group – once on the fringes but now in the ruling coalition – hoping for full Israeli control to resettle Gaza and even drive out Palestinians. And his ideas permeate mainstream debate.
“We must promote a solution to encourage the emigration of Gazans,” far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said on January 1.
Far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who also holds a position in the Defense Ministry, says Israel “will rule there.” And in order to be able to govern there safely for a long time, we have to have a civilian presence.”
The United States' top diplomat is so concerned that he has publicly rejected these plans.
“These statements are irresponsible, they are inflammatory, and they will only make it more difficult to secure a future for the Palestinian-run Gaza Strip when Hamas is no longer in control and terrorist groups are no longer able to threaten Israel’s security,” Secretary of State Antony told Blinken during a recent trip to Qatar.
Opinion polls in Israel on the question of settlement restoration vary widely, reflecting the subtleties in the way the question is asked and the fact that public opinion is in great flux following the October 7 Hamas attack is, says Dahlia Scheindlin, a survey expert, journalist and contributor to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
Getty Images
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich (left) and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir (right) have advocated for the mass relocation of Palestinians outside the Gaza Strip to make way for Israeli settlers, stoking fears of a Palestinian exodus.
“The general range is from about 25% who want to restore permanent communities, Jewish-Israeli communities in Gaza, to about 40%,” she told CNN about several surveys conducted in November and December. “This is not a small part of Israeli society.”
There is also a proven track record in Israel of politicians introducing seemingly extremist ideas into mainstream discussion and even legislation. Netanyahu last year supported an attempt by a right-wing minister from his own Likud party to push through a law limiting the Supreme Court's ability to review the Supreme Court, despite months of protests that rocked the country. This proposal never received majority support, but was nevertheless signed into law by the Knesset. The Supreme Court rejected the proposal earlier this month, saying it would represent a “severe and unprecedented blow to the core characteristics of the State of Israel as a democratic state.”
“Ideas that often seem very extreme at a particular period of Israel's history can become more and more incrementally normalized over time – sometimes a little under the radar, not really hidden, but not really promoted,” Scheindlin said of the Israeli one Policy making.
Diana Buttu, a Palestinian human rights lawyer who served as an adviser to the Palestinian Authority, gives little credence to Netanyahu's alleged opposition to the re-establishment of settlements in the Gaza Strip.
“As much as Netanyahu may say he won't do it, he will eventually do it,” she told CNN. “Because as Palestinians we have long learned that in the end they will find some excuse – you know, the coalition has to stay together, whatever. And the Palestinians always pay the price for that.”
Far from being a new idea, the desire to repopulate Gaza stems from decades of frustration over then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's 2004 decision to dismantle 21 Israeli settlements in Gaza – known as Gush Katif – and their 8,000 Jewish ones Evicting residents, a process that led to resettlement was completed in 2005.
Settler activists like Yishai Fleisher, a spokesman for Jewish settlers in Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, sense an opportunity.
“For people like me, who belong to the so-called Israeli right, who have been warning about this situation for years and protesting the 2005 withdrawal, nothing has changed,” Fleisher told CNN. “October 7 was just proof of what we have been saying all along.”
As a protester, Fleisher was among those expelled from Gaza by the Israeli government in 2005. With public opinion in flux, he hopes his movement's moment has come.
“People are waking up – they are trying to open their minds,” he said of his compatriots who are reassessing their politics after October 7.
If the Palestinians in Gaza are “post-jihad and pro-Israel and want to live a good life on this beautiful soil, there should be an opportunity for that,” he said. “Anti-Israel and pro-jihadist Arabs must go. And they have to find somewhere else to go. It could be Turkey, and it could be Jordan, and it could be South America,” he said. “If they can’t make it in their hearts to live in or alongside the Jewish state, we can’t have them.”
The Norwegian Refugee Council warned in December that “any attempt by Israel to deport and permanently displace Palestinians within and from Gaza would constitute a serious violation of international law and an atrocity crime.”
According to the United Nations, since October 7, about 85% of Gaza's population, or about 1.9 million people, have been displaced from their homes – many of whom moved several times to avoid airstrikes and heed Israeli warnings about military attacks, and were largely pushed into a small, southwestern corner of the territory.
Israel was accused by South Africa last week of genocide in the Gaza Strip. His lawyers argued before the International Court of Justice in The Hague that Israel's military campaign was aimed at “bringing about the annihilation” of its Palestinian population and that the Israeli leadership's statements signaled their “genocidal intent.” Israel strongly denied the accusation, saying the charges were “a concerted and cynical attempt to distort the meaning of the term 'genocide' itself.”
In the Gush Katif Museum in Jerusalem, former settlers print T-shirts in bright orange. This color was adopted in 2004 and 2005 by the movement protesting Israel's withdrawal from Gaza. At that time, Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers withdrew settlers from the settlement synagogues. Days later, Palestinian forces leveled the buildings.
“Home, back to Gush Katif,” reads the slogan on the T-shirts.
The movement to restore Gush Katif has also found a place among some of the many (IDF) soldiers posting on social media from Gaza.
A photo from a devastated street in the Gaza Strip shows two soldiers holding an Israeli flag that has been altered to include an orange stripe and the Hebrew words “Come home!”
Another photo shows soldiers holding an orange banner that reads: “Only a settlement would be considered a victory!”
When Israeli megastar Hanan Ben Ari serenaded Israeli troops before their deployment in October, he sang:
Back to Gush Katif
play beachvolleyball
Foundation of Nova Beach on the coast of Gaza
The nation of Israel lives!
Social media
Two soldiers in Gaza hold an Israeli flag that has been altered to include an orange stripe and the Hebrew words: “Come home!”
Those who advocate for renewed Israeli settlements often frame their arguments in humanitarian terms, arguing that Palestinians would have a better life elsewhere.
“This is a right, just, moral and humane solution,” said Ben Gvir, who was previously convicted of supporting terrorism and inciting anti-Arab racism.
Gila Gamliel, Israel's intelligence minister and a Likud member, suggested in November that Israel should “promote the voluntary resettlement of Palestinians in Gaza outside the Gaza Strip on humanitarian grounds.”
Fleisher also told CNN: “I would want to go if I were in a war zone with children.”
Between 68% and 81% of buildings in the northern Gaza Strip were damaged by Israel's war in Gaza, according to an analysis of satellite images through January 5 by researchers at Oregon State University and the City University of New York. Across the Gaza Strip, the figure is between 45% and 56%.
Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, which exercises limited self-rule in the West Bank, has made clear that his government “totally rejects the expulsion of any Palestinian citizen.”
However, the vision of voluntary emigration could “automatically come true,” Omer Bartov, an Israeli-born professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, told CNN.
“Can the population now return to the largely destroyed north of the Gaza Strip?”
“As a result, there is an opportunity for these ministers, media people, etc. on the Israeli right to say, 'Well, the most humanitarian solution is to remove this population' – or, as they say, to encourage exodus from Gaza. If that happens, the entire scenario I am talking about will be seen as ethnic cleansing.”
Buttu, who said she had little doubt about the determination of some in Israel to resettle Gaza based on their West Bank settlement efforts, expressed similar concerns.
Israel has “created the conditions under which Gaza is no longer worth living in,” she said. “Now they're just packaging it as some kind of humanitarian gift or a humanitarian solution, when in reality it's about helping Israel and ethnically cleansing Gaza of Palestinians.”
Netanyahu rejected the idea of new settlements as “unrealistic,” saying in an English-language statement that “Israel has no intention of permanently occupying Gaza or expelling its civilian population.”
In October, the Israeli government admitted that a leaked intelligence document proposing the relocation of millions of Palestinian Gazans to Egypt's Sinai Peninsula was genuine, but downplayed its significance as “a preliminary paper, like dozens of such papers published by all political and security policy levels”. ”
Nonetheless, the fact that the resettlement movement is now being discussed openly in the Israeli parliament or Knesset, as was the case at a committee hearing earlier this month, is a turning point in the debate. And despite international discontent, its right-wing extremist supporters are not holding back.
“We must first occupy, annex, destroy all the houses there and build neighborhoods there,” said Tzvi Sukkot, a Knesset representative from Smotrich’s Religious Zionism, during the committee hearing.
The only image that can convince Israel's enemy of its defeat, said Limor Son Har Melech of Ben Gvir's Jewish Power Party to applause, is “the settlement and Jewish children walking through its streets.”