Israel’s defense and finance ministers have announced plans to establish new illegal settlements in both Gaza and the occupied West Bank, marking a significant escalation in the government’s annexation drive.
Defense Minister Israel Katz said he is seeking to establish three Nahal military outposts in northern Gaza, at sites where Israeli communities existed before Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from the territory. Surveying the ruins of northern Gaza, Katz described the devastation as giving him a “good feeling” and framed the outposts as a security necessity.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who also oversees the Defense Ministry’s Settlement Administration, said he has “completed plans” for three settlements in northern Gaza and is waiting only for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s approval to proceed immediately.
The announcements come as a senior Israeli commander disclosed that the military now controls approximately 65% of the Gaza Strip, a figure that directly contradicts the terms of the cease-fire deal Trump brokered.
In the West Bank, the pace of settlement expansion has accelerated dramatically. Nine settlement plans have been advanced since the beginning of July alone, according to Palestinian monitoring groups. Land seized through unauthorized outposts has more than doubled since the war began. Israel has also resumed construction in four settlements evacuated in 2005, Homesh, Sa-Nur, Ganim and Kadim, after repealing the Disengagement Law.
The international community has condemned the moves. The European Union renewed its call on Israel to halt settlement expansion this week, and EU foreign ministers formally approved sanctions on individual Israeli settlers in May. France and Sweden are pushing for trade restrictions with settlements.
The new settlement plans represent a fundamental departure from every cease-fire framework negotiated since the war began in October 2023. None of those frameworks, whether American-brokered, Qatari-hosted or Egyptian-mediated, envisaged permanent Israeli military settlements inside Gaza.
Katz’s Nahal outpost plan adds a new complication: if established, they create facts on the ground that would make any future Gaza civilian governance structure dependent on Israeli military permission to exist. The Nahal system, which combines military presence with civilian infrastructure, has historically been used in the West Bank and pre-2005 Gaza to anchor Israeli control before permanent civilian settlement.
Smotrich has been the driving force behind the expansion. He has called for the annexation of 82% of the West Bank and has described the destruction in Gaza as “the demolition phase” of “urban renewal.” Speaking at a real estate conference in Tel Aviv last year, he said: “We did that, now we need to start building.”
The announcements coincided with the Trump administration’s campaign to dismantle the International Criminal Court, which issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu in 2024. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s office announced a “whole-of-government” effort to sanction ICC personnel and press allies to withdraw from the court, removing the most credible international mechanism capable of addressing what legal scholars have called crimes against humanity.