An Israeli real estate developer has come under fire for proposing the creation of luxury beachfront villas for Israeli settlers over the bombed-out ruins of Gaza.
The developer in question is Harey Zahav, an Israeli company notorious for partnering with the Israeli government to build settlements in the illegally occupied West Bank. (Related: 145 Nations support U.N. General Assembly resolution condemning Israeli settlement activities in Occupied Palestinian Territories.)
Harey Zahav recently put out an advertisement regarding the construction of new luxury villas along the bombed-out beaches of Gaza. "Wake up! A house on the beach is not a dream!" the ad reads, with the company promising an Israeli return to Gush Katif – a bloc in the southern Gaza Strip that used to be made up of 17 illegally built Israeli settlements with nearly 9,000 residents. The communities were demolished and the settlers removed in 2005 as part of Israel's "disengagement" from Gaza.
"We at the Harey Zahav company are working to prepare the groundwork for a return to Gush Katif. Several of our employees have started working on land reclamation, clearing out trash and expelling trespassers," reads the caption below the pictures posted on Harey Zahav's social media accounts. "We hope that in the near future all of the hostages will return home safely, the soldiers will return home and, God willing, [we will] start building in every part of Gush Katif."
An Israeli real estate company is already drawing up plans for settlements in the Gaza Strip.
"A house on the beach is not a dream!" the ad reads. Below, it says their employees are "expelling invaders."
Israel's attacks are not about "defense."
This is ethnic cleansing. pic.twitter.com/PPNKslaGET
— CODEPINK (@codepink) December 18, 2023
A joke gone wrong?
Following the uproar over the settlement plans, Harey Zahav Founder Ze'ev Epshtein claimed that the whole thing was "a joke gone wrong" while still insisting that he would like Harey Zahav to lead efforts to build new homes for Israeli settlers in the Gaza Strip if the government would allow it.
"We thought it would just be a joke for our followers," said Epshtein.
In an interview with Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz, Epshtein said that he and his employees were hearing talk about what would happen on the "day after" the conflict in Gaza ends, and one option being discussed was reoccupying the Gaza Strip and reestablishing Israeli settlements there.
Epshtein noted that as fervent Zionists, that is also his and his employees' preferred approach and that their post was merely meant "to raise awareness" to this proposal.
This "joke" to "raise awareness" of Israeli proposals to preoccupy the Gaza Strip comes as Israeli attacks have already killed around 20,000 Palestinians while displacing over 85 percent of the Strip's besieged population and blockaded 2.3 million people since early October.
This proposal from Harey Zahav is also part of an increasingly popular sentiment among Israeli officials and institutions for reoccupying the Gaza Strip.
Recently, Israeli Intelligence Minister Gila Gamliel – a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's extremist Likud party – has drafted a plan to ethnically cleanse all Palestinians in Gaza into Egypt's Sinai Peninsula.
Separately, the Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy – an extremist think tank – declared that Israel currently has "a unique and rare opportunity to evacuate the entire Gaza Strip."
Such plans have been widely condemned as being reminiscent of the Nakba, a genocidal event in 1948 when the first Israeli settlers ethnically cleansed more than 750,000 Arabs from parts of then-Mandatory Palestine by either massacring them or forcibly displacing them.
Watch this clip reporting on Harey Zahav's plan to build luxury homes for Israelis in Gaza.
This video is from The Prisoner channel on Brighteon.com.
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