There used to be several Israeli settlements in Gaza, until they were evacuated, so that Gaza could be a free fire zone.

That is a huge distortion. The Israeli government under Ariel Sharon decided to evacuate all Israeli presence from the Gaza Strip in 2005, handing farms and other facilities intact, and giving full control to the Palestinian Authority, as an act of peaceful disengagement. The Palestinians chose to destroy the assets handed over to them. At that time there was relatively peaceful coexistence between Israel and the Palestinians with tens of thousands of Palestinian workers commuting into Israel on a daily basis. Hamas did all it could to undermine that coexistence with acts of terror. In 2007 Hamas took over the Gaza Strip in a violent coup and set the sides on a path to war.

Sharon tried to put a similar disengagement plan into effect in the West Bank and managed to remove three settlements before he suffered a stroke and was replaced as prime minister, and the plan died. There was huge opposition to the disengagement plans from Israel’s right wing parties. The plans certainly were not meant to turn Gaza into a “free fire zone”.