Haaretz offers up the following:
Israel Air Force planes dropped pamphlets on the Gaza Strip offering Palestinians Israel’s terms for a cease-fire, the Itim news agency reported on Friday.
The pamphlets said the Israeli government was willing to cease the Israel Defense Forces attacks on Gaza if abducted soldier Gilad Shalit is returned unharmed and militants stop firing Qassam rockets at Israeli settlements.
Sderot and Askhelon are Israeli cities, not settlements.
Translation error, lazy rewire from wire copy, or Avi Issacharoff’s personal biases?
Update: They changed the word to “communities.”
Here’s my guess: the original Hebrew word was “yishuvim,” which the translator rendered as “settlements.” In present-day Hebrew, the word “yishuvim” can be translated as “settlements” or as “communities.”
A bit of background: The Hebrew word for “settlement” is “hitnahalut” (pl. “hitnahaluyot”). When that word became stigmatized, officials and the media began using the more neutral “yishuvim,” which can be translated as “commmunities,” as a code word for “settlements.” But a yishuv is actually any kind of settled area, from a village to a town to a city to an entire country — the Jewish community in pre-state Palestine was known as “the Yishuv.”