Jewish settlers have set their sights on Gaza’s beachfront amid the escalating war in Palestine.
A member of the radical settler organisation called Nachala (homeland), Mrs Daniella Weiss, considered the grandmother of Israel’s settler movement, claims she already has 500 families ready to move to Gaza immediately.
She had been organising Jewish settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, on Palestinian land captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war.
“I have friends in Tel Aviv,” she says, “so they say, ‘Don’t forget to keep for me a plot near the coast in Gaza,’ because it’s a beautiful, beautiful coast, beautiful golden sand”.
Following an interview conducted by BBC, the English news outlet published a detailed report exploring how after the October 7 attack, Jewish settlers are now seeing an opportunity to resettle Gaza. Opinion polls however suggest that most Israelis oppose resettling Gaza, and it is not government policy.
“The world is wide,” she says. “Africa is big. Canada is big. The world will absorb the people of Gaza. How we do it? We encourage it. Palestinians in Gaza, the good ones, will be enabled. I’m not saying forced, I say enabled because they want to go.” reads a quote from the story.
Another Jew interviewed for the story is Yehuda Shimon who has raised 10 children here in a settler outpost in the West Bank called Havat Gilad, or Gilad’s Farm, near the Palestinian city of Nablus.
All around him there are Palestinian villages, the nearest 500m away. There is no contact between them, he says.
“We must do it. It’s part of Israel area,” he says. “This is the land that God gave us, and you couldn’t go to God and tell him, ‘OK you gave me, and I gave to other people.’ No. I believe in the end we will go back to Gaza.”
“They have 52 other places to go in the world,” he says, “52 Muslim countries”. He says the new Gaza will be “another Tel Aviv”.
The reporter who conducted the interview and wrote the story ended her report by stating that a seasoned Israeli journalist told me it won’t happen. “Calls to resettle Gaza won’t be translated into policy,” he said.
So far more than 32,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza, most of them women and children. The World Health Organization regards the ministry’s data as credible.
