GAZA BORDER, Israel — A river of Israeli flags winds through a desert path as hundreds of people, young and old, march toward the border in a display of their determination to build new Jewish settlements atop the rubble of northern Gaza.
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So few buildings are left standing after Israeli bombardment that the Mediterranean is visible in the distance.
Daniella Weiss, founder of the radical right-wing settler group Nachala, sums up the crowd’s intentions.
“We are here on the way to new Jewish communities in Gaza,” she told NBC News in an interview at the border in late April.
“What we did in Judea and Samaria, we are going to do the same thing here,” Weiss added, a reference to the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where illegal Jewish outposts and settler violence against Palestinians have grown dramatically in recent years.
While the march toward Gaza was a symbolic one, the statement it made still resonates across the Middle East. It also marks the journey Weiss and her hard-line movement have made from the fringes of Israeli society toward the political mainstream, propelled by the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack in which 1,200 people were killed and about 250 taken hostage.
Weiss, who has referred to the events of Oct. 7 as a “miracle,” told NBC News that it had changed history by showing “the world, very expressively, what Hamas wants to do with us.”
As early as Oct. 9, 2023, 20 members of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, signed a letter demanding absolute control over the strip as one of the four goals of the war. This gave the movement its first tailwind.
The Israeli military campaign that followed Oct. 7 displaced around 90% of Gaza’s population, according to the United Nations. The offensive killed more than 72,500 people, according to the Ministry of Health in Gaza. And in the nearly seven months since a ceasefire, continued Israeli attacks have killed over 845 people, the ministry says.
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Inside the Israeli movement pushing for resettlement in Gaza
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Today, the Nachala movement’s vision of turning Gaza into a thriving Jewish community is very much alive. And Palestinians do not exist anywhere in this version of a Jewish Gaza.
“The 2 million or whatever number of Arabs, Gazans, who live here will not live in Gaza,” Weiss said. “It can take a week, it can take maybe a few months. They will not live here.”
Nachala and other groups like it are advocating the wholesale ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, prominent Palestinian politician Mustafa Barghouti said.
“They don’t accept a two-state solution, and they don’t accept one democratic state solution,” he told NBC News. That leaves only one option for the far right, he said: “Complete control and elimination of the Palestinian presence.”
Weiss and others with similar beliefs are getting a boost from the highest echelons of the Israeli government. While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said he does not support Jewish resettlement of Gaza, he helms the most right-wing government in the country’s history, which includes several hard-right settler leaders like Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.
Speaking to a crowd in a synagogue earlier last month, Smotrich said that Gaza needs to be “all ours, entirely Jewish, through Israeli settlement. The enemy should leave it and find their luck elsewhere.”
But while they are growing in power domestically, Nachala, Weiss and the settlement movement in general have been condemned internationally.
The British government hit them with sanctions in May 2025. According to a statement released by the U.K. Foreign Office, Weiss was “involved in threatening, perpetrating, promoting and supporting acts of aggression and violence” against Palestinians. Nachala was involved with “facilitating, inciting, promoting and providing logistical and financial support” for illegal outposts and the forced displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank and Israel, it said.
The Canadian government has also imposed sanctions on Weiss.
The United States has not sanctioned Weiss or Nachala, although in 2024 under President Joe Biden it did sanction four extremist settlers in the West Bank.
Meanwhile, settlements in the West Bank — where an estimated 700,000 Jews live among about 3 million Palestinians — are considered illegal under international law. Israel views West Bank settlements as legal if they are authorized by the government.
In Gaza in 2005, between 8,000 and 9,000 Israeli settlers were removed under the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who argued that the 21 settlements were expensive and hard to defend. The scenes of security personnel forcibly removing weeping and resistant settlers deeply divided Israeli society. But until recently, the idea of returning Israeli settlements to Gaza remained a nostalgic dream reserved for those on the extreme right fringes, viewed by the majority as a messy and expensive experiment best left in the past
Today, the idea of resettling Gaza also appears to be gaining popularity among more mainstream Israelis.
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