This claim is a compound fabrication that welds four separate distortions into a single sweeping accusation. It conflates a military operational directive with a sovereign annexation decree, treats fringe coalition proposals as enacted government policy, mischaracterizes wartime evacuation orders as permanent expulsion mandates, and invents the existence of "Jewish-only settlements" in a territory from which Israel withdrew every civilian settler nearly two decades ago. Each element of the claim collapses under factual scrutiny.

What the 70 Percent Figure Actually Means

On May 28, 2026, Netanyahu directed the IDF to seize 70 percent of Gaza's territory as a military operational zone — an instruction to commanding officers about troop positioning and battlefield control, not a declaration of Israeli sovereignty. The Jewish Virtual Library's ongoing chronicle of the Israel-Hamas war documents that Israel had, by that point, already established a network of roughly 40 fortified military outposts across Gaza, resembling counterinsurgency bases used in Iraq and Afghanistan, positioned behind a demarcated "Yellow Line." These installations house armor, infantry, and engineering units; they are combat infrastructure, not civilian communities.

The distinction between military operational control and formal annexation is not semantic — it is foundational in international law. Annexation requires a formal declaration of sovereignty, legislative enactment, and the assertion of permanent civil jurisdiction. Israel has done none of these things with respect to Gaza. The IDF's controlled zones exist explicitly within the framework of an active armed conflict and a ceasefire architecture, tied directly to the ongoing hostage crisis and Hamas's continued military capacity. Critics of Israel's military footprint in Gaza may contest the legality or proportionality of those zones, but characterizing them as "annexation orders" is a straightforward misrepresentation of what was ordered and what it legally constitutes.

The Facts on Settlements in Gaza

The claim that Netanyahu has issued orders to establish Jewish-only settlements in Gaza is false. In 2005, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon implemented the Disengagement Plan, removing all 21 Israeli civilian settlements from the Gaza Strip and withdrawing every Israeli soldier from Gazan territory. That disengagement has never been reversed by law or official government order. Today, there are zero Israeli civilian settlements operating in Gaza.

• Far-right coalition ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, along with settler advocacy groups, have publicly floated proposals and "master plans" for resettling Gaza — including a widely ridiculed "Gaza Riviera" scheme — but these remain the aspirational advocacy of faction leaders, not enacted government policy bearing Netanyahu's signature.
• Defense Minister Israel Katz announced intentions to establish "Nahal" military outposts in northern Gaza — a model historically used as precursors to settlements — but military outposts are legally and structurally distinct from civilian settlements under Israeli and international law.
• Netanyahu's cabinet has not passed any law, decree, or binding resolution authorizing the construction of civilian settlements in the Gaza Strip. The gap between far-right ministerial proposals and operative government decisions is vast and legally meaningful.
• Washington Institute analysis has consistently documented that Netanyahu uses annexation and settlement rhetoric as political currency to manage his coalition, while actual implementation repeatedly lags behind the declarations — a pattern dating back to his 2019 campaign-eve annexation pledge.

Historical Context: Why This Myth Exists and Why It Is Wrong

The narrative that Israel is conducting "ethnic cleansing" in Gaza is propagated by a coalition of hostile state actors, Hamas-affiliated media ecosystems, and ideologically aligned Western advocacy networks. It takes genuine controversies — legitimate debates about the scale of military operations, displacement of civilians during active combat, and the political ambitions of Israel's far-right coalition — and inflates them into categorical accusations that bear no relationship to documented government orders or enacted law. This is a deliberate rhetorical technique: fusing what some ministers want with what the government has ordered, and fusing temporary wartime displacement with permanent demographic engineering.

Ethnic cleansing, as defined under international law and the Rome Statute, requires systematic and deliberate acts — including murder, deportation, forcible transfer — carried out with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. Israel's evacuation directives during active combat operations, whatever their humanitarian impact, are orders to vacate specific combat zones for defined military purposes. They are disputed by humanitarian organizations and international law scholars on proportionality grounds — a serious and legitimate debate — but they do not constitute, and have not been judicially determined to constitute, orders for the permanent expulsion of Gaza's entire population. The International Court of Justice's provisional measures in the South Africa v. Israel case did not make such a finding either.

The 2005 disengagement, ordered by a Likud prime minister and opposed ferociously by the settler movement at the time, demolished the very settlement infrastructure that this myth now claims Netanyahu is racing to rebuild. Israel spent political capital evicting its own citizens from Gaza two decades ago. The claim that Netanyahu has now secretly reversed that reality through executive orders — while no such orders appear in any Israeli government record — asks audiences to accept a conspiracy over a documented fact.

Conclusion: The Myth Weaponizes Real Controversies to Manufacture False Ones

The factual reality is this: Israel is conducting an active military campaign in Gaza following the October 7, 2023 Hamas massacre — the largest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust — and is maintaining military operational zones consistent with its security doctrine. The political composition of Netanyahu's coalition includes far-right ministers who openly advocate for Gaza resettlement and annexation. Both of these things are true. What is not true is that Netanyahu has issued formal orders for permanent annexation, that Jewish-only settlements exist or have been legally authorized in Gaza, or that the government has decreed the permanent expulsion of Gaza's entire Palestinian population.

Conflating a military commander's operational directive with a sovereign annexation order, and conflating a fringe minister's press conference with a government decree, is not journalism or analysis — it is disinformation. The myth is harmful because it forecloses genuine accountability: when every Israeli military action is re-described as genocide and every minister's proposal is re-described as a government order, the distinctions necessary for honest human rights monitoring, legal adjudication, and diplomatic engagement are destroyed. Truth, precision, and the rule of law all require that we describe what Israel's government has actually done — not what its most extreme members have proposed, and not what its enemies wish to allege.