From settlements to blocked recovery: Israeli strategy taking shape in Gaza
With the ruins of the Gaza Strip lying around him, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz last week renewed his push to set up illegal settlements
With the ruins of the Gaza Strip lying around him, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz last week renewed his push to set up illegal settlements in the battered territory’s north. “I intend to establish three Nahal outposts, which is also a military entity, in those places that were in northern Gaza,” Katz told Channel 14, referring to bases that combine farming with an armed presence in a bid to consolidate control over a territory. The minister said, in his view, establishing these settlements would enhance security – but execution would have to be “in the right way, at the right timing, while coordinating”. It was not the first time the member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party has made such remarks. In December, Katz said the Israeli military would “never leave all of Gaza” but “in due course” would establish Nahal posts despite a United States-brokered plan stipulating a full Israeli military withdrawal and barring the re-establishment of Israeli settlements. His comments also echoed a recent statement by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich that “the groundwork to establish three settlements in the North Gaza area” had been completed. Smotrich, who also holds the portfolio of “settlement administration” in the Ministry of Defence, has repeatedly called for the full occupation of the Gaza Strip. Such a push has been central to the goals of Israel’s settler movement, which in January 2024 organised a conference attended by government ministers to advocate for the re-establishment of settlements in the Strip. “This is their ideology. They want the Gazans out of Gaza and they want to settle there like they settle in the West Bank,” former Israeli diplomat Alon Liel told Al Jazeera.
All settlements on Palestinian land are illegal under international law, but settlement expansion and annexation have been a core objective of Netanyahu’s hard-right government. In recent years, it has carried out unprecedented settlement expansion, resulting in the forced displacement of dozens of Palestinian communities and the de facto annexation of land in the occupied West Bank. Issam Younis, a prominent Palestinian human rights defender and director of the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, said he was not surprised by Katz’s latest comments. “It was very clear from day one in the genocide that the main goal was to make life impossible in Gaza by destroying everything,” he told Al Jazeera. “It’s a race for time – take over land, starve Gaza and deny it any chance at life, then expel the population and build settlements.” Younis said Israel’s conduct during its genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza and the “ceasefire” agreed in October under the US plan clearly showed that expelling the population is the main objective of the Israeli government. “Dehumanising statements by senior Israeli officials reaffirmed this: calling Palestinians in Gaza ‘human animals’, saying that there are no civilians in Gaza, then saying clearly that the objective was to expel the population and create settlements in the Gaza Strip,” Younis added. Israel made no secret of that objective. In early 2025, the government announced it was setting up an agency to oversee the “voluntary migration” of Palestinians from Gaza as part of a plan proposed by Katz. The announcement drew widespread international condemnation. Experts warned that such a move would amount to a war crime.
The BriefWire