JERUSALEM — While surveying the northern Gaza ruins of a Palestinian neighborhood, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said the widespread destruction gives him a “good feeling” and announced plans to permanently establish Israeli military outposts across the neighborhood.
“Feels good, doesn’t it?” When asked how he felt after seeing the devastation in Gaza, Katz said: Anadolu Agency reported. The Defense Minister described the shift in Israeli operational tactics in approving terms: “Instead of going in and out, the army is in, the terrorists are out, and homes are destroyed.”
The three outposts described by Katz are designated as Nahal settlements, a specifically Israeli category that combines military presence with civilian infrastructure, and were historically used in the West Bank and Gaza Strip before 2005 to consolidate Israeli control and precede permanent civilian settlement. He said that the settlement outposts would be established in locations in northern Gaza where there were Israeli communities before Israel’s withdrawal from the Strip in 2005, describing this step as a security necessity.
Palestinian authorities have reported more than 73,000 people killed, 173,000 injured, and 91 percent of Gaza’s infrastructure damaged or destroyed since the start of Israeli military operations on October 8, 2023. Northern Gaza, where Katz was on Monday, saw the first and most sustained bombardment. Entire neighborhoods were leveled to the ground in the first weeks. Families who stayed south were ordered, then bombed in the south, then ordered north again as Israeli military units moved through areas they said had been cleared.
This sequence produced what Katz called a “good feeling.” He did not describe it as a tragedy or the unfortunate cost of war. Call it a strategy.
The Nahal outpost plan represents a fundamental departure from every ceasefire framework negotiated since the outbreak of war in October 2023. None of these frameworks, whether American-brokered, Qatari-hosted, or Egyptian-brokered, envisioned the establishment of permanent Israeli military settlements inside Gaza. The government deadlock hampering Gaza’s reconstruction has already prevented any civilian administration from entering the Strip nine months after the ceasefire was agreed upon. Katz’s announcement adds a new complication: If the Nahal outposts are established, it will create facts on the ground that would make any civilian governance structure in Gaza dependent on Israeli military permission to exist.
The announcement came on the same day the Trump administration announced a campaign to dismantle the ICC, which has issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Galant in 2024. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s office described a “whole-of-government” effort to punish ICC staff and pressure US allies to withdraw from the court. The coincidence of the two announcements, with Katz calling the destruction of Gaza fun and Washington pledging to protect Israeli leaders from accountability for it, did not appear to be a coincidence. Trump’s move to disable the ICC eliminates the most credible international mechanism capable of addressing what legal scholars and UN officials have repeatedly described as crimes against humanity.
There is a long history of Nahal outposts that the Israeli government does not bring to the forefront when it uses this term. The Nahal regime began as a paramilitary youth movement that combined military service with agricultural work in the 1940s. After 1967, it became the primary mechanism for establishing settlements in the occupied West Bank, with Nahal’s often military outposts becoming permanent civilian settlements within years. Fourteen of them were in Gaza before the 2005 withdrawal, when Sharon’s government removed all settlers and military personnel. Katz’s proposal to restore it is not incidental to the settlement project. It is the settlement project, in its early form.
The declared settlement outposts are located in northern Gaza, where the highest civilian death toll has been recorded and where Israeli military operations have been continuing to their greatest extent. No date or timetable for the start of construction has been set, no mechanism has been described for how the Palestinian residents, those who survived, will be displaced for the final time, and no Israeli political opponent has publicly responded to the plan before this article was submitted.
International condemnation has been clear and without consequence throughout the Gaza campaign. This pattern is unlikely to change now: a State Department statement, a call for restraint, or a procedural vote in a body unable to enforce its decisions. Arrest orders issued by the International Criminal Court against Netanyahu and Gallant remain unimplemented. The outpost plan is, on paper, illegal under international law. And so was every other step that preceded it.
What Katz’s ad does, unusually, is compress what is usually kept implicit into a single sentence. The destruction of Palestinian housing is the bottom line, not a side effect. “Good Feeling” is the emotional chronicle of a policy that has killed more than 73,000 people and left 91 percent of Gaza’s built environment in ruins. This sentiment, broadcast on Israeli state television, is the public record of what happened.
The question is whether any international actor with the authority to act on it would treat Monday’s broadcast as a revelation of the truth.
