Israel’s ghoulish settlers eye up Gaza for settlements

A screenshot from a video of Itamar Ben-Gvir making a speech about colonizing Gaza while marching with supporters towards the perimeter fence of the Gaza Strip on July 19, 2026.

This is an edited version of my new article on my website, Israel’s Ghoulish Settlers Eye Up Gaza, As Netanyahu Kills Trump’s Board of Peace. Please click through to read the whole article if you want more.

On Sunday evening (July 19), a group of some of the most repulsive, ghoulish people on the face of the earth marched towards the perimeter fence separating the Gaza Strip from the rest of the world to declare their intention to re-colonize Gaza, to re-establish three Israeli settlements that were dismantled in 2005 when, under Ariel Sharon, 21 settlements in total were abandoned, occupied, at the time, by 8,000 Israeli settlers.

These fanatical Israeli settlers, on what was billed as the “March of Thousands”, although only a few hundred people attended, were led by the two far-right ministers in Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government — Itamar Ben Gvir, the Minister for National Security, who is in charge of Israel’s prisons, which, for Palestinians, have become a gulag of torture facilities since October 7, 2023, and Bezalel Smotrich, the Minister of Finance, and also the minister in charge of settlement affairs within the Defense Ministry, who has played a huge role in the ever-growing, and ever more violent expansion of Israel’s illegal settlements in the West Bank.

Speaking at the rally, Ben Gvir said, “If someone had said three years ago that we would control 70% of the Gaza Strip, no one would have believed it. So today I say: there will be Jewish settlement throughout Gaza. We are returning home. Gaza is ours.”

Smotrich, meanwhile, warned that a change of government in the forthcoming elections in October, could “roll back all the Zionist and national settlement revolution” undertaken over the last four years.

The two men were accompanied by more than two dozen ministers and legislators, as well as the 80-year old settler fanatic Daniella Weiss, who told the crowd, “They ask me, ‘What will happen to the Arabs in Gaza?’ There will be no Arabs in Gaza, unequivocally.”

Netanyahu’s reticence in the face of selective western outrage about the West Bank

Although Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party was listed as a sponsor of the rally, Netanyahu was noticeably silent about it. This, undoubtedly, wasn’t because he fundamentally opposes the settlers’ aspirations to re-colonize Gaza, but because, while western countries have been and continue to be largely indifferent to the almost immeasurable military slaughter and destruction in Gaza, they have been far more outspoken about settler activities in the West Bank.

On May 28 this year, the EU imposed sanctions on three individuals and four violent settler movements, including Daniella Weiss and her Nachala Settlement Movement, which, as they described it, “encourages and facilitates coercive acts that lead to the forced displacement of Palestinians”, and whose “outposts obstruct access to Palestinian agricultural and grazing land and have been persistent sources of settler violence.”

Netanyahu is also aware that both Ben-Gvir and Smotrich were sanctioned last June by the governments of the UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Norway “for their repeated incitement of violence against Palestinian civilians” in the West Bank, followed by Slovenia and the Netherlands in July, and Spain in September, even though neither man has yet been issued an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court — for war crimes and crimes against humanity — as is the case with Netanyahu himself, and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant.

While the IDF sought to prevent the settlers’ rally, designating the surrounding area as a “closed military zone” for 24 hours, and setting up barriers with the military police, which the settlers mostly managed to avoid, it would be unwise to think that Israel Katz, Israel’s current defense minister, is unsympathetic to the settlers’ cause.

Tiresomely well known for identifying any gathering of Palestinians or Lebanese as a “terror nest”, Katz said, just last week, on Israel’s Channel 14, “I intend to establish three Nahal outposts, which is also a military entity, in those places that were in northern Gaza” — a reference to military bases that, as Nour Odeh explained for Al Jazeera, “combine farming with an armed presence in a bid to consolidate control over a territory.”

Although the settlers claimed that they were “returning home after 21 years,” as a banner declared, this is nothing but historical revisionism, as the decision to withdraw from Gaza in 2005 was an act of deliberate “disengagement” that was meant to stymie further Palestinian demands, as Belén Fernández explained in May last year.

Psychotic indifference to genocide — from Israel to Jared Kushner

What was particularly sickening about Sunday’s rally was the gleeful indifference of those gathered — as a beautiful sunset incongruously lit up the sky — to the fact that they were overlooking a vast concentration camp, the size of east London, which is littered with the buried corpses of at least 10,000 Palestinians.

Almost all civilians, they remain buried under 60 million tonnes of debris — “20 times the combined amount generated by conflicts worldwide since 2008”, in the Guardian’s words — which has been created as a result of Israel’s still-unending 33-month genocidal assault, in which, at the barest minimum, over 73,000 Palestinians, again, overwhelmingly civilians, have been killed.

A screenshot from a video of Daniella Weiss speaking to supporters about the colonization of Gaza at the perimeter fence of the Gaza Strip on July 19, 2026.

As I watched the video of the monstrous Daniella Weiss, I realized that I hadn’t been so sickened by callous indifference to the industrial slaughter of an entire people since January this year, when, at Davos, Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, and a prominent real estate investor, first presented his AI-generated vision of “New Gaza”, a futuristic high-rise coastal tourist resort on Gaza’s shoreline, which, as I described it, captured “the callous, ghoulish, cruel and heartless opportunism of those who see the world only through a lens of business opportunities and maximum profit-making for themselves and their cronies.”

As I further described it in February, when Trump’s Board of Peace held its inaugural meeting in New York, what was so grotesque about Kushner’s vision, as it was paraded for a second time, was that it was “a techno-futuristic vision rising up not in some pristine desert, or on some sort of neglected brownfield site, but on a genocidal crime scene of unparalleled depravity.”

“New Gaza”: a PowerPoint image from Jared Kushner’s presentation at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland on January 22, 2026.

Kushner’s vision was also devoid of Palestinians, as, of course, is the settlers’ vision.

On Sunday, as on most occasions when the settlers address the world, they made a point of emphasizing that the solution, for the Palestinians, is “voluntary migration”, a lie that is regular wheeled out to create an illusion that Israel’s intent is anything other than the persistent extermination of the Palestinian people through every means available — primarily, direct military action, starvation, disease and the destruction of the entire healthcare sector.

However much Daniella Weiss rants and raves about western countries “helping out” with Israel’s Palestinian “problem”, no one is going to become involved in what would be the largest and gravest crime of ethnic cleansing in history. Muslim countries won’t do it, if for no other reason than that it might destabilize their regimes through their populations’ sympathy with the Palestinians, and western countries won’t, because Weiss has failed to recognize that every single western country is now struggling with massive opposition to any kind of immigration whatsoever through a resurgence of far-right racism.

In the full article on my website, I proceed to draw from and analyze a recent Guardian article by Julian Borger, in Jerusalem, assessing how the grand dreams of the Board of Peace have withered, largely through Israeli intransigence, so that the plans for a Palestinian committee to oversee Gaza, and for an International Stablilization Force to maintain order, are now focused solely on trying to establish a single “pilot scheme”, a temporary camp in Rafah for tens of thousands of displaced people, while Israel maintains a stranglehold on the majority of the surviving population, squeezed into an ever smaller area of land in which they continue to be subjected to unacceptable deprivation.

As I state in my conclusion:

No one seems to have the power to oblige Israel to cooperate, except, perhaps, Donald Trump himself, but he appears to have no interest in doing so, either because, as I suggested, he has lost interest, or, perhaps, because, although he doesn’t strike me as a Zionist — through his interest, solely, in himself; in what we might call being “Trumpist” — he is also beholden to Israeli interests through the significant financial donations made to him by prominent pro-Israeli figures like Miriam Adelson, the widow of the casino owner Sheldon Adelson, whose fanatical support for Israel is undisputed.

While Julian Borger ably demonstrated how sidelined Trump and his Board of Peace seem to have become, none of this helps us to see a future beyond the grim reality of now — of a still-tightening, suffocating noose on Gaza that those wielding it still refuse to consider relinquishing, caught, as they are, in a fixation with nothing but the slow extermination of the Palestinian people.

Will any leaders in the west wake up, and see that, beyond the grim settler violence in the West Bank, which they are so ready to criticize, they have allowed Trump’s largely empty contributions to Gaza’s future to enable them to pretend that something far, far worse isn’t happening right next to the West Bank, in the grotesque, ongoing death camp depravity of the Gaza Strip?

Read the whole article here.

Please also read my Substack Notes

Just a reminder that, in between posts, I regularly post Notes here on Substack, which you can find here.

Over the last week, I’ve continued to campaign for the release of Dr. Hussam Safiya, the brave hospital director, held without charge or trial since December 2024, who has become an international icon of Israel’s violent depravity. Here I amplified a column in Haaretz by Gideon Levy, and I also posted an update from his attorney, after another alarming prison visit. I also wrote about one of his colleagues, Dr. Hassan Almukayed, who has been held since October 2024, and I also updated my report from May, Who Are the 75 Doctors and Medical Staff from Gaza Still Held in Israel’s Gruesome Prisons for Palestinians? as well as promoting a new call for the doctors’ release by the Palestinian Center for Prisoners’ Advocacy.

Two other Notes were very well received — one amplifying an astonishing message of resistance and resilience by Ellie Kamio, one of the Filton 4, sentenced as a terrorist in the UK for talking direct action against an Elbit Systems factory, and another celebrating the resistance to Israel’s ongoing genocide by Holocaust survivors and their descendants in the UK, which is my most viewed Note, and, on Facebook, has had over 160,000 views.

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