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 Jewishsettlementsatop 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 radicalright-wing settler groupNachala, 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 Palestinianshave grown dramatically in recent years.
While the march toward Gaza was a symbolic one, the statement it made still resonates across the Middle East.
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 her hard-line movement have made a journey 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.
Source: Drudge Report
