Israeli Ministers to Advance Bill Allowing Occupation of Gaza
A bill that would strip away the legal prohibition on Israelis entering, residing in, and moving through the Gaza Strip is set to go before the Israeli Ministerial Committee for Legislation on Sunday. This comes as the regime's campaign in Gaza, recognized by the UN as genocide, continues into its third year, with the territory's population displaced, starved, and bombarded even as ministers debate the legal mechanics of who gets to live there next.
The bill, brought by Knesset deputy speaker Limor Son Har-Melech of Otzma Yehudit, would repeal the clauses of the 2005 Disengagement Law that currently bar Israeli citizens from the territory. Its stated purpose is blunt, to remove from Israeli law any prohibition on Jews and Israelis entering Gaza, opening the door to a legal Israeli presence there.
It’s not a standalone effort. Son Har-Melech led the parallel campaign in 2023 that gutted the same law for the northern West Bank, a move that returned the settlements of Homesh and Sa-Nur to the map, with efforts ongoing to restore Ganim and Kadim as well. This bill applies the identical legal mechanism to Gaza.
In her own framing, Son Har-Melech ties the move directly to October 7, arguing that the attack proved withdrawals and expulsions of Jewish residents don’t deliver security, and that the answer is to deepen Israeli presence rather than retreat from it. The bill’s language goes further still, declaring there are no areas of the Land of Israel that Jews should be barred from entering, and casting itself as the first step toward a full reversal of the disengagement.
That argument arrives as the same government she serves in has overseen the destruction of Gaza, a campaign the UN has confirmed as genocide, killing tens of thousands of Palestinians and reducing much of the territory to rubble. The "security" the bill promises Israelis is being built, quite literally, on that ground.
After two decades of incremental moves to dismantle the legal architecture of the 2005 withdrawal, piece by piece, settlement by settlement, the campaign has arrived at Gaza itself.