Bezalel Smotrich, the far-right finance minister of Israel, said Tuesday that the country was “closer than ever” to rebuilding Jewish settlements in Gaza that were evacuated 20 years ago, adding that the war there had created the opportunity to expand them even further.

Mr. Smotrich’s remarks came soon after the Netherlands announced it was barring him and another far-right government minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, from entering the country in an effort to pressure Israel into stopping the 21-month war that has devastated Gaza.

The Palestinian enclave is now in the grips of a dire hunger crisis that has brought international outrage.

Both Mr. Smotrich and Mr. Ben-Gvir have called for the war to continue. They want “voluntary” migration of Gaza’s population of two million Palestinians, a measure that international legal experts have said would amount to ethnic cleansing.

The pair have already been sanctioned by other countries, including Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Norway and Britain, for inciting violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. They have also been barred from entering Slovenia.

Speaking at a conference for the anniversary of Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in the summer of 2005, Mr. Smotrich described the territory as “an inseparable part of the land of Israel.”

“It’s real,” he said of the idea of Israeli settlers’ returning to Gaza. “For 20 years we called it wishful thinking. It seems to me it is now a real working plan.”

Mr. Smotrich, who also is the minister for settlement affairs in the Ministry of Defense, made his remarks as the humanitarian crisis reached new depths in Gaza. About 60,000 Palestinians, including thousands of children, have been killed in the war, according to Gaza health officials, whose data does not distinguish between combatants and civilians.

Much of the coastal enclave of Gaza has been reduced to rubble, and most of the population has been displaced. A United Nations-backed food-security group said Tuesday that famine was unfolding across most of the territory, citing months of severe aid restrictions imposed by Israel.

The war was set off by the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and about 250 more people were abducted to Gaza. Negotiations for a 60-day cease-fire that would bring the release of some of the 50 remaining hostages, about half of whom are believed to still be alive, have stalled.

Asked by an interviewer at the conference if the Israeli government was discussing an actual plan to reestablish settlements in Gaza, Mr. Smotrich did not give a direct answer but said, “Where there is no settlement there is no army; where there is no army there is no security.”

“I don’t want to return to Gush Katif,” he said, referring to the group of Jewish settlements in southern Gaza that were abandoned in 2005 as part of the Israeli government’s so-called disengagement plan from Gaza.

“It’s too small and crowded,” he said of the original area of the group. “It has to be much larger,” he said, adding that the situation in Gaza today “allows for bigger thinking.”

Mr. Smotrich has opposed Israel’s efforts, made under international pressure, to facilitate the entry of more aid into Gaza in recent days, and he has threatened in the past to leave the government under such circumstances. But he told the audience Tuesday that he was staying in office because he has “a reasonable basis to assume that good things are going to happen.”

In a separate statement responding to the travel ban, Mr. Smotrich said what was more important to him than being able to enter the Netherlands or other European countries was “that my children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and all Jews around the world, be able to live in the state of Israel safely for decades and centuries to come.”

In the withdrawal of 2005, Israel pulled its troops and about 8,000 settlers out of Gaza, which it had captured from Egypt in the 1967 war, and demolished the 21 settlements it had built there. Right-wing supporters of the settlement movement decried what they called an “expulsion” and vowed to return and rebuild.

The office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not immediately respond to a request for comment about possible plans to reestablish Israeli settlements in Gaza.

Myra Noveck contributed reporting.