President Trump declared on Tuesday (4) that the United States should take control of Gaza and permanently relocate the entire Palestinian population from the devastated coastal enclave, one of the most brazen ideas any American leader has proposed in years.
Welcoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House, Trump said that all two million Palestinians in Gaza should be transferred to countries like Egypt and Jordan due to the devastation caused by Israel’s war against Hamas following the terrorist attack on October 7, 2023.
“The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will also do a job on it,” Trump said at a press conference on Tuesday night. “We will own it and be responsible” for disposing of unexploded ordnance and rebuilding Gaza into a mecca for jobs and tourism. Sounding like the real estate developer he once was, Trump promised to turn it into the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
While the president framed the issue as a humanitarian imperative and an economic development opportunity, he effectively reopened a geopolitical Pandora’s box with far-reaching implications for the Middle East. Control over Gaza has been one of the main flashpoints of the Arab-Israeli conflict for decades, and the idea of relocating its Palestinian residents recalls an era when Western powers redrew the region’s maps and moved populations without regard for local autonomy.
The proposal for the United States to take over territory in the Middle East is a complete reversal of Trump’s position on the region. When he first ran for president in 2016, he promised to extract America from the region after the Iraq war and condemned nation-building.
In unveiling the new plan, Trump did not cite any legal authority that gives him the right to take over the territory, nor did he address the fact that the forced removal of a population violates international law and decades of American foreign policy consensus on both sides. Reactions
Hamas, which has ruled Gaza for most of the past two decades and is reestablishing control there now, immediately rejected the mass relocation, and Egypt and Jordan rejected the idea of receiving a large influx of Palestinians, given the heavy history, burden, and potential destabilizing effects.
Sami Abu Zuhri, a senior Hamas official, said that the relocation proposed by Trump was “a recipe for creating chaos and tension in the region.”
“Our people in Gaza will not allow these plans to materialize,” he said in a statement distributed by Hamas. “What is needed is the end of the occupation and aggression against our people, not expelling them from their lands.”
Trump ignored the opposition from Arab countries like Egypt and Jordan, suggesting that his powers of persuasion would convince them.
“They say they will not accept,” Trump said during a meeting with Netanyahu in the Oval Office. “I say they will.”
Netanyahu, sitting next to Trump, smiled with satisfaction as the president first outlined his ideas. Later, during the joint press conference, the Israeli prime minister praised Trump.
“You get straight to the point,” Netanyahu told Trump. “You see things that others refuse to see. You say things that others refuse to say and, after jaws drop, people scratch their heads and say: ‘You know, he’s right.’”
“This is the kind of thinking that will reshape the Middle East and bring peace,” he added. The Sad History of Gaza
Gaza has a long and sad history of conflict and crisis. Many residents of Gaza are descendants of Palestinians who were forced to leave their homes during the 1948 war following Israel’s independence, an event known in the Arab world as Nakba, or catastrophe. Now, Trump is suggesting they be displaced again, even though the Geneva Conventions—international agreements that the United States and Israel have ratified—prohibit the forced relocation of populations.
Egypt captured Gaza during the 1948 war and controlled it until Israel took it along with other Palestinian territories in a 1967 war against a coalition of Arab nations seeking to destroy the Jewish state. Palestinians in Gaza waged violent resistance for years afterward, and Israel finally withdrew from Gaza in 2005.
Two years later, Hamas, a declared enemy of Israel that the United States and other nations have designated as a terrorist group, took control of the enclave and used it as a base for war against Israel.Source: The New York Times