The Israeli settler movement preparing to return to Gaza

Northern Gaza border - Tamar Ben Simon, an Israeli from Haifa, brought her three young children to Israel’s border with Gaza on Sunday.

Looking across the fence at the annihilated landscape of Gaza City, near the former Israeli settlement of Nissanit, she sees a future home.

Ben Simon was among thousands attending a demonstration organised by Nachala, a hardline settler movement campaigning to re-establish Israeli settlements in Gaza.

Sunday’s rally called specifically for Israelis to return to Nissanit, which was evacuated during Israel’s 2005 disengagement from the territory.

“I want to live there with my children,” Ben Simon told The New Arab, arguing that doing so would help “protect the security of Israel”.

Ben Simon said she had no problem living alongside Palestinian citizens of Israel. “I live with Arabs. I live in Haifa,” she said, pointing to her friends and former colleagues at a hospital in the city.

But when asked about the Palestinians living in Gaza, she spelt out a different vision: “First of all, in Gaza, there is no future for Arabs. It’s a pity, but they did this to themselves,” she said.

Since 7 October 2023, Nachala has been at the forefront of efforts to re-establish Israeli settlements in Gaza. The movement has close ties to Israel’s far-right, with ministers and coalition lawmakers repeatedly attending and supporting its events.

Among those attending on Sunday was Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. “I hope that even before the elections we will reach Nissanit,” he said, addressing the crowd.

If not, Ben-Gvir, leader of the far-right Jewish Power (Otzma Yehudit) party, said he hoped to serve as defence minister in the next government and “return us to Nissanit, and to the entire northern perimeter, and to all of Gaza”.

The upcoming Israeli election on 27 October was a central theme in speeches, campaign material, and interviews with attendees conducted by The New Arab.

A new front in Israel's far-right politics

The rally also highlighted a political battle on Israel’s right, where Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud is competing with smaller far-right parties, including Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power and Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism, for settler votes.

“As we get closer to the election, the far-right religious parties are trying to position themselves as [distinct] from the others, and to draw votes from Likud,” Dror Etkes, founder of Kerem Navot, an Israeli organisation that monitors settlement policy in the occupied West Bank, told The New Arab.

Etkes said the push to resettle Gaza allows these parties to present themselves as a force capable of pressuring Netanyahu to resist Washington’s opposition to Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territory.

The US administration’s stated policy for Gaza, as outlined in Trump’s plan, says that Israel will not occupy or annex the territory and calls for the eventual withdrawal of Israeli forces as an international security force takes control

On 5 February 2025, Trump was asked about the prospect of Israeli resettlement in Gaza during an Oval Office meeting with Netanyahu and said, “I don’t see it happening.”

But according to Shaiel Ben-Ephraim, a political commentator and former Israeli diplomat, the resettlement of Gaza is not a question of “if, but when,” and that getting in the way of the settler movement’s ambitions would be politically costly for Netanyahu and others.

“Members of Knesset like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Limor Son Har-Melech were at the demonstration as well as influential rabbis. They will relentlessly campaign for this until they get what they want,” he told The New Arab.

For some of those campaigning to return to Nissanit, the site has a personal significance. Hundreds of Israelis lived in the settlement before it was evacuated in 2005, and some former residents now hope to return.

One attendee, Nissim Avinoam, said he helped establish Nissanit. “I was expelled in 2005, and I came today from Kibbutz Neve Yam. I wanted to see where I was expelled from. It’s my home. I still miss it there, 21 years later,” he said.

But for others, Nissanit is just another conquest on the path to creating greater Israel. “My name is Tehiya Chaim, mother of 11 children, may they multiply, from the settlement of Evyatar in Judea and Samaria,” another woman said.

“Our goal is to raise the flag of Jewish settlement, and to stand and strengthen our Prime Minister, without giving up, until we see Jewish settlement in the Gaza region,” she told The New Arab.

Attendees expressed indifference to the devastated nature of Gaza. They plan on moving there anyway.

“It really doesn’t scare us. We are prepared to build settlements and build cities very quickly. We have logistics teams, we have capability, we have the desire and joy, and the government behind us,” Chaim said.

Waiting for the green light

That preparation has also taken on a grassroots form. According to Ben-Ephraim, prospective settlers have organised into garinim, or settlement nuclei, designed to move into Gaza as soon as they receive a green light from the government.

By April 2025, he said, around 800 families had signed up, with some 30 already living together at temporary sites near Gaza.

A teenage girl who introduced herself as Tamar, from Elad, east of Tel Aviv, said that Israelis needed to “conquer this land. We don’t want Arabs to take it for themselves”.

One of her friends then interjected: “It’s already ours, we are returning it to ourselves,” prompting laughter from the group of girls.

As the sun began to set over the Gaza border, electronic dance music continued to play as a group of young Israeli children lined up at an ice cream truck. Not long afterwards, the distant rumble of successive explosions cut through the music.

On this side of the fence, however, the war formed the backdrop to something resembling a festival.

Fin de Pencier is a Canadian journalist and filmmaker based between Lebanon and Palestine

Follow him on X: @finlookedintoit

Edited by Charlie Hoyle