With or without 7 October: Israel’s Gaza endgame was always ethnic cleansing
Muhammad Shehada writes in The New Arab on 8 October 2026:
In April 2023, six months before the 7 October attacks, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held a meeting with Yoav Gallant, his then defence minister, and Alon Davidi, the mayor of Sderot – an Israeli city built on top of the historic Palestinian village of Huj.
Gallant and Davidi casually joked about flattening Gaza to rebuild Jewish-only settlements on its ruins. “I would also like to build in Beit Hanoun (in Gaza), but I will settle for Sderot,” said Davidi. Gallant replied, “In order to build in Beit Hanoun, you first need to flatten the area there.”
A month earlier, Israel’s Minister of Settlements Orit Strook said explicitly, “I don’t know how many years it will take…returning to Gaza will take a lot of sacrifices. Gaza is part of the land of Israel, and we will return to it one day.” Strook was reiterating what the deputy head of Israel’s Knesset, Limor Son-Har Melech, said the same day. “Our task now is to return to the settlements in Gush Katif and rebuild them,” he said, in reference to Israeli settlements in Gaza that were evacuated in 2005.
Israel’s finance minister and de facto ruler of the occupied Palestinian territory, Bezalel Smotrich, had also promised on the eve of the Netanyahu government’s formation in December 2022 that Israel would “return” to rebuild Jewish settlements in Gaza.
Three years into Israel’s war, these statements now sound like prophetic declarations of intent.
Beit Hanoun was levelled to the ground during the war, just as Gallant said. Earlier this year, Limor Son-Har Melech led a group of settlers deep inside Gaza, planting trees to mark the first step towards rebuilding settlements in the enclave