ONE-THIRD of the members of parliament from Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, including a Cabinet minister, will attend an event on “Preparing to Resettle Gaza”, according to media reports from the country.
The Times of Israel quoted a poster advertising the October 21 event as reading: “A year after the pogroms [of October 7], we will stand together – Likud members, regional branch chairs, MKs and ministers – to jointly declare that ‘Gaza is ours. Forever’."
It was reportedly shared on a WhatsApp channel alongside the message: “Victory is settlement. It is doable.”
It comes despite international law saying that it would be illegal for Israel as an occupying power to move its own population into Gaza.
Haaretz, Israel’s longest running newspaper and its paper of record, reported that the event would feature “the construction of a sukkah [a temporary hut] has part of a ‘city of sukkahs’ initiative by the Nachala movement, which is known for establishing illegal outposts in the West Bank”.
Haaretz reported that Social Equality Minister May Golan had confirmed she would attend the event, alongside up to nine other Likud MPs out of the party’s 32.
It comes despite Netanyahu having previously insisted that settling Gaza “was never in the cards”.
It said such acts render “Israel’s presence in the occupied Palestinian territory unlawful”, adding that its continued presence was ”illegal” and should be ended as “rapidly as possible”.
In the opinion read out by court president Nawaf Salam, the court found that “the transfer by Israel of settlers to the West Bank and Jerusalem as well as Israel’s maintenance of their presence, is contrary to article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention”.
Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states: “The occupying power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”
According to the US government, the Israeli occupied territories “include the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip”.
The news of the resettlement event comes as the Israeli military said it was looking into whether Hamas’s top leader Yahya Sinwar was killed in a military operation in Gaza.
An Israeli airstrike on a school sheltering displaced Palestinians killed at least 15 people, including five children, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. It is unclear if the two are connected as Israel has not yet given Sinwar’s suspected location.
Sinwar was one of the chief architects of Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7 last year, and Israel has vowed to kill him since the beginning of its retaliatory campaign in Gaza.
The report came as Israeli forces continued a more than week-old major air and ground assault in the Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza, where the Abu Hussein school was hit on Thursday.
Fares Abu Hamza, head of Gaza health ministry’s local emergency unit, confirmed the death toll from the strike and said dozens of people were wounded. He said the nearby Kamal Adwan Hospital was struggling to treat the casualties.
In a separate development, a building in central Beirut that houses offices of the Al Jazeera news network and the Norwegian embassy was evacuated after a warning.
Mazen Ibrahim, Al Jazeera’s Lebanon bureau chief, said the building’s administration had received three calls telling everyone to leave the property, which he said also houses the embassies of Norway and Azerbaijan, as well as dozens of offices.
He said it was unclear who called in the warning.
Norwegian foreign ministry spokesperson Ragnhild Simenstad said the building was evacuated after a “bomb threat”, without elaborating.
