I ran into a merge conflict when a branch had changed a file and I was merging in another branch where the file had been deleted and placed in gitignore.   Some suggestions on handling this here:

• fetch – Force git to overwrite local files on pull. – Stack Overflow

I used:

• git checkout <your-branch> -f

I then need to “git rm” the file in the branch where it had been modified.  I’m not sure what exactly happened to the file since I didn’t care much about it.