In recognition of 20 years since the Gaza pullout, JNS is featuring the second in a series of articles reflecting Israel’s disengagement, speaking with an array of former Gush Katif residents to find out how they perceive the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the Trump plan for the Gaza Strip and the prospect of returning.
After Hamas stormed Israel’s border on Oct. 7, 2023, and slaughtered 1,200 people and kidnapped 251 others, the Gush Katif Heritage Center—the national museum commemorating the legacy of the Jewish communities of Gaza and northern Samaria—faced a dilemma.
How should it publicly respond to the tragedy that its management believed was a direct result of the sacrifice of the Gush Katif communities in the 2005 disengagement from the Gaza Strip?
“We felt like we couldn’t do our usual tour, taking people through the Visitors Center, as we did before Oct. 7,” said Laurence Beziz, project manager of the center in Nitzan, near the site of the former “Caravilla” camp that housed Gush Katif evacuees for years after their displacement.
“Whatever we would add couldn’t be in the style of ‘We told you so.’ It doesn’t fit with who we are and our timing, with anything. It’s the worst thing to say,” she asserted.
Beziz speaks fluent Hebrew with a French accent. She made aliyah from Paris in 1981, at age 20, making her home in Gadid, an agricultural settlement in Gush Katif. Gadid, founded in 1982, consisted of more than 60 families before they were uprooted during the disengagement ordered by the government of Ariel Sharon in 2005.
She now lives with her husband in Be’er Ganim near Ashkelon, where about half of the Gadid community rebuilt their lives.
Back in Gush Katif, she worked in the urban center of Neve Dekalim in various organizational and social welfare roles. Playing an active role in the Gush Katif Heritage Center’s establishment in 2008 blended her skills in non-profit management with her deep desire to tell the story of the community she loved—and lost.
‘Teach their children’
After years of deliberation, the center came up with an idea that resonated with Beziz: an exhibition about former residents of Gush Katif, most of whom were kids or teens at the time of the “expulsion” (as they refer to disengagement), returning to the site of their former homes not as residents but as Jewish warriors.
The exhibition appears in panels on the outer walls of the Visitors’ Center and seeks to portray the essence of the Gush Katif pioneers and their progeny: patriotic, valiant, deeply connected to the sands of Gaza and still dedicated to their country, even after feeling betrayed by it. Continuing a Gush Katif tradition, they serve in elite military units in higher proportions than the rest of the Israeli population.
Some of the IDF fighters, all in reserves, left when they were young children, and they have only faint memories, though their parents help refresh them, according to Beziz.
“The memory of Gush Katif is very alive, and it’s important for them to teach their children,” she said.
Each panel includes profiles of soldiers alongside photographs of their youth in Gush Katif and recent shots of them in fighting gear deep in Gaza as part of the current war. For them, being in the Strip wasn’t merely a national mission of self-defense but a cathartic return to a childhood and life ripped away from them.
As they neared the site of the former Gush Katif communities, including Nisanit, Netzarim and Neve Dekalim, memories of the dunes where they once played, the rough contours of the roads where they went off-roading and, most of all, the ocean where they loved to swim came back to them, stirring deep emotions, they said.
“It was a joy to receive the embrace of Mother Earth, like a mother who has been yearning for you,” recalled a Ganei Tal resident in his profile. Another soldier, from Neve Dekalim, described how he relished the chance to view his community and the Mediterranean coastline from a vantage point he had never seen as a child: the battlefield in Khan Yunis, a Gazan city neighboring his home community.
While hardly a trace of their physical homes remains (only public buildings and synagogues were spared from destruction back in 2005), some soldiers have found objects from Gush Katif communities, such as family door signs, packaging from the farms, dishware, even a kiddush cup. Most of the Gush Katif region today consists of a humanitarian zone filled with tents inhabited by Arab refugees.
Another exhibition, whose entry begins with a makeshift “tunnel” marked “Gaza” in Arab graffiti, aims to present Gush Katif in the wider context of Israel’s modern history, starting with the construction of Jewish settlements there before the founding of the state that Israel forfeited in the 1940s.
“We’re talking about a larger concept—a strip of land that is very significant throughout the years,” Beziz said.
Beziz is not active in the growing political movement in Israel to return to Gush Katif. The idea of returning—and how to return—is a hotly debated topic among the people of Gush Katif and at the center, she said. For her, the return must be more than just physical.
“For me, the idea is not to go back to Gush Katif, but to go back to a type of social, historical, Zionist, Jewish awareness that it’s a part of the State of Israel,” she said. “If there is no awareness of this kind, I have no interest in going back to Gush Katif.”
Since Oct. 7, Beziz has engaged in dialogue groups with a cross-section of Israeli society, including kibbutzniks in the “Gaza Envelope” who were once their ideological adversaries, “to bring the message that we want to break down walls and try to be a society that disagrees rationally, without putting the other down.”
The color orange
Ultimately, the color of the Gush struggle—bright orange—also became the color symbolizing the catastrophe of Oct. 7.
Israel supporters across the world widely shared orange memes on social media as a tribute to the orange-haired Bibas children—Ariel, 4, and Kfir, nine months—murdered by Hamas along with their mother, Shiri. Their father, Yarden Bibas, was released alive by Hamas on Feb. 1, 2025, after he had spent 484 days in captivity.
Could this be a sign signaling a mystical connection between the pullout from Gaza and Oct. 7?
“Some say there is no coincidence, and I’m a woman of faith,” Beziz told JNS. “There is no coincidence. Maybe some things connect. On the one hand, I say: It’s too obvious. So, no, it’s not. Or maybe there’s something deeper to it. But yes! Orange came back.”
Orit Arfa (www.oritarfa.net) is a journalist and author based in Berlin. At the time of the IDF’s 2005 pullout from Gaza, she was based in Gush Katif and covered it extensively. Her first novel, The Settler, follows its aftermath through the eyes of a young American-Israeli evacuee who “resettles” in Tel Aviv.