In the absence of an official Israeli postwar plan, settlers push their goal of a Jewish Gaza

While Israel's government has been vague about its vision for what happens to the Gaza Strip — and the roughly two and a half million Palestinians who live there — after the war, the country's far-right settler movement has a very clear idea of what it wants.

Over the weekend, thousands of right-wing activists attended the "Settlement Brings Security" conference in Jerusalem. On display in the foyer was a huge green map of Gaza, dotted with clusters of proposed Jewish settlements.

The map showed a Star of David placed on top of Gaza City. Prior to Israel's recent assault, which drove out most of its population, it was Gaza's largest community, with 600,000 Palestinian residents.

Organizers at the conference stood behind booths handing out T-shirts and brochures inviting potential settlers to make early plans to relocate.

"Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu left us an opening for returning to Gaza," said chief settler organizer Daniella Weiss, one of the movement's most prominent voices. "He invites this pressure that you see here today," she told CBC News at the event. 

The implication was that the conference was actually part of a broader — but not yet public  — Israeli government strategy to occupy the Palestinian territory when the war ends.

Officially, Netanyahu does not support resettlement of Gaza, saying in November it was "not a realistic goal."

During talks last week with the United States, Israel's defence minister, Yoav Gallant, reportedly ruled it out again. 

But underscoring how politically powerful the settler movement has become in Israel, nearly a third of Netanyahu's cabinet ministers as well as up to 15 additional Knesset members, including members of Netanyahu's Likud Party, attended Settlement Brings Security.

Among the highest-profile attendees were National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, both of whom are reviled by many Israelis on the political left and centre, who accuse them of being racists. 

"If you don't want another 7th of October, you have to return home and control the territory," Ben-Gvir told the crowd in a keynote address.

Establishing Jewish settlements in Gaza would be illegal under international law, and the forced removal of Palestinians from their communities would amount to a war crime.  

Nonetheless, Israeli political watchers say within a society struggling to deal with the trauma of the Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7, which killed about 1,200 people, the idea of expanding Jewish communities into Gaza under the supervision of Israel's military is seeing growing support.

"We can no longer look at this as some kind of fringe phenomena," said Dahlia Scheindlin, an Israeli-Canadian pollster and political analyst based in Tel Aviv.