Jewish settlers set their sights on Gaza beachfront

Who wouldn't want a house on the beach? For some on Israel's far-right, desirable beachfront now includes the sands of Gaza.

Just ask Daniella Weiss, 78, the grandmother of Israel's settler movement, who says she already has a list of 500 families ready to move to Gaza immediately.

"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".

She tells them the plots on the coast are already booked.

Mrs Weiss heads a radical settler organisation called Nachala, or homeland. For decades, she has been kickstarting Jewish settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, on Palestinian land captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war.

Some in the settler movement have cherished the dream - or pipedream - of returning to Gaza since 2005, when Israel ordered a unilateral pullout, 21 settlements were dismantled and about 9,000 settlers were evacuated by the army. (Reporting from Gaza at the time, I saw many who were literally dragged out.)

Many settlers saw all this as a betrayal by the state, and a strategic mistake.

Opinion polls suggest that most Israelis oppose resettling Gaza, and it is not government policy, but since the Hamas attacks on 7 October it is being talked about out loud - by some of the loudest and most extreme voices in Israel's government.

Mrs Weiss proudly shows me a map of the West Bank with pink dots indicating Jewish settlements. The dots are scattered all over the map, eating away at land where Palestinians hope - or hoped - to build their state.

There are about 700,000 Jewish settlers in these areas now and settler numbers are rising fast.

The vast majority of the international community considers settlements illegal under international law, including the United Nations Security Council. Israel disputes this.

We meet Daniella at her home in the West Bank settlement of Kedumim, where red-roofed houses are spread over hilltops and valleys. She's in constant motion despite having an arm in plaster.

Her vision for the future of Gaza - now home to 2.3 million Palestinians, many of them starving - is that it will be Jewish.

"Gaza Arabs will not stay in the Gaza Strip," she says. "Who will stay? Jews."

She claims that Palestinians want to leave Gaza and that other countries should take them in - although in a lengthy interview, she rarely uses the word "Palestinian".

"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."

There is no evidence that Palestinians want to leave their homeland - although many may now dream of escaping temporarily, to save their lives. For most Palestinians, there is no way out. The borders are tightly controlled by Israel and Egypt, and no foreign countries have offered refuge.

I put it to her that her comments sound like a plan for ethnic cleansing. She does not deny it.

"You can call it ethnic cleansing. I repeat again, the Arabs do not want, normal Arabs do not want to live in Gaza. If you want to call it cleansing, if you want to call it apartheid, you choose your definition. I choose the way to protect the state of Israel. "

A few days later, Daniella Weiss is selling the idea of a return to Gaza over cake and popcorn at a small gathering, hosted by another settler in their living room.

She has a projector, showing a new map of Gaza, complete with settlements, and leaflets entitled "Go back to Gaza".

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