Trump Proposes U.S. Takeover of Gaza and Says All Palestinians Should Leave The president met with the Israeli prime minister at the White House, meeting in person with another world leader for the first time since returning to power.
President Trump declared on Tuesday that the United States should seize control of Gaza and permanently displace the entire Palestinian population of the devastated seaside enclave, one of the most brazen ideas that any American leader has advanced in years.
Hosting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel at the White House, Mr. Trump said that all two million Palestinians from Gaza should be moved to countries like Egypt and Jordan because of the devastation wrought by Israel's campaign against Hamas after the terrorist attack of Oct. 7, 2023.
"The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it too," Mr. Trump said at a news conference Tuesday evening. "We'll own it and be responsible" for disposing of unexploded munitions and rebuilding Gaza into a mecca for jobs and tourism. Sounding like the real estate developer he once was, Mr. Trump vowed to turn it into "the Riviera of the Middle East."
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While the president presented the matter as a humanitarian imperative and an economic development opportunity, he has, in fact, reopened a Pandora's box with deep geopolitical consequences for the Middle East. It's one of the biggest flash points in the Arab-Israeli conflict, and moving the Palestinian population out of it evokes the days when the great powers of the West were redrawing maps of the area and shifting populations about with disregard for local authority.
The idea that the United States had completed a land grab in the Middle East would represent a dramatic U-turn for Mr. Trump, who ran for office in 2016 promising to extract America from the region after the Iraq war and decried the nation-building of his predecessors. In announcing the plan, Mr. Trump did not cite any legal authority giving him the right to take over the territory, nor did he address that forcible removal of a population violates international law and decades of American foreign policy consensus in both parties.
He made the proposal even as the United States was seeking to secure the Israel-Hamas cease-fire's second phase, which is designed to free the remaining hostages in Gaza and bring a permanent end to the fighting. Negotiators had described their task as exceptionally difficult even before Mr. Trump announced his idea of ousting Palestinians from their homes.
Hamas, which has ruled in Gaza for most of the past two decades and is re-establishing control there now, immediately rejected mass relocation on Tuesday, and Egypt and Jordan have rejected the idea of taking in a large influx of Palestinians, given the fraught history, burden, and destabilizing potential.
"It is a recipe for creating chaos and tension in the region," Sami Abu Zuhri, a senior Hamas official, said. "Our people in Gaza will not allow these plans to come to pass. What is needed is the end of the occupation and the aggression against our people, not expelling them from their land."
Mr. Trump dismissed opposition from Arab states such as Egypt and Jordan, leaving them with an idea that their abilities of negotiation might prevail upon these states to oblige his call.
"They tell me they're not going to accept," Mr. Trump said in a preceding meeting with Mr. Netanyahu at the Oval Office. "I say they will."
Mr. Netanyahu, seated at Mr. Trump's right, beamed with satisfaction as the president laid out his thoughts. Later, in the joint news conference, the Israeli prime minister lavished praise on Mr. Trump.
"You cut to the chase," Mr. Netanyahu told Mr. Trump. "You see things others refuse to see. You say things others refuse to say, and after the jaws dropped, people scratch their heads and they say, 'You know, he's right.'"
"This is the kind of thinking that will reshape the Middle East and bring peace," he added.
READ MORE: Trump says Palestinians should leave Gaza permanently
According to Mr. Trump in his address, Palestinians would warm quickly to his idea. "I don't think people should be going back to Gaza," Mr. Trump said. "I heard that Gaza has been very unlucky for them. They live like hell. They live like they're living in hell.". Gaza is not a place for people to be living, and the only reason they want to go back and I believe this strongly because they have no alternative.
He proposed that states in the neighborhood could fund the relocation of Gazans to a new place, perhaps "a good, fresh, beautiful piece of land," which would better serve their living conditions as one or twelve territories. "It would be my hope that we could do something really nice, really good, where they wouldn't want to return," he said, without offering any details of what that would involve.
Asked how many Palestinians he had in mind, he said, "All of them," adding, "I would think that they would be thrilled." Pressed repeatedly on whether he would force them to go even if they did not want to, Mr. Trump said, "I don't think they're going to tell me no."
Gaza has a long and tortured history of conflict and crisis. Many Gazans are descendants of Palestinians who were forced out of their homes during the 1948 war after Israel's independence, an event known around the Arab world as the Nakba, or catastrophe. Now Mr. Trump is suggesting that they be displaced again, even though the Geneva Conventions — international agreements that the United States and Israel both ratified — bar forcible relocation of populations.
Egypt took Gaza in the 1948 war and retained it until Israel took it, along with other Palestinian territory, in a 1967 war against a coalition of Arab nations bent on destroying the Jewish state. Palestinians in Gaza engaged in violent resistance for years thereafter, and Israel eventually withdrew from Gaza in 2005.
But within two years, Hamas, an avowed enemy of Israel that the United States and other nations have designated a terrorist group, took control of the enclave and used it as a base for war against Israel.
Israel blockaded Gaza for years, while Hamas fired rockets and staged terrorist attacks, culminating in the October 2023 operation that killed 1,200 people and led to the capture of 250 more. Israel retaliated with an unrelenting military operation that killed more than 47,000 people, according to Gazan health officials, whose count does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
In the weeks since a cease-fire that President Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s administration negotiated and that Mr. Trump pushed came into effect, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who were repeatedly displaced throughout the war have returned to their homes in Gaza to find themselves and their communities demolished. Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump's Middle East envoy, visited Gaza last week and said it would take 10 to 15 years to reconstruct.
If you had damage that was one-hundredth of what I saw in Gaza, nobody would be allowed to go back to their homes," Mr. Witkoff said Tuesday, addressing reporters. "That's how dangerous it is. There are 30,000 unexploded munitions. It is buildings that could tip over at any moment. There are no utilities.
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