President Donald Trump has said the US will “take over” the Gaza Strip and that Palestinians should permanently leave the enclave in the strongest indication yet that he wants the 2.2mn population resettled in countries such as Egypt and Jordan.
Speaking as he held talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House on Tuesday, Trump said “all” Palestinians in Gaza should “be resettled”.
“The US will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it, too. We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site,” he said alongside Netanyahu after the meeting.
Asked whether he would send US troops to Gaza, Trump said: “We’ll do what is necessary . . . we’re going to take over that place, we’re going to develop it, we’re going to create thousands of thousands of jobs and it’ll be something that the entire Middle East can be very proud of.”
His comments sparked scepticism within the US and were rejected by Saudi Arabia, a key ally of Washington.
The proposal would upend decades of US policy and fuel outrage across the Arab world, where Washington’s allies have long warned against the forced displacement of Palestinians.
Trump said he anticipated “representatives from all over the world” living in Gaza, “Palestinians also”, he said, adding that he imagined Gaza could be “the Riviera of the Middle East”.
Netanyahu, speaking alongside Trump, said his proposal was “worth paying attention to”.
“He sees a different future for that piece of land that has been the focus of so much terrorism,” said Netanyahu. “We’re talking about it. He’s exploring it with his people, with his staff. I think it’s something that could change history.”
Egypt and Jordan have already rejected Trump’s plans to resettle Palestinians outside Gaza after the US president last month said it was time to “clean out” the enclave.
Trump said on Tuesday he believed leaders in Cairo and Amman, which both receive significant amounts of US aid, would “open their hearts and will give us the kind of land that we need to get this done and people can live in harmony and peace”.
Arabs view such moves as akin to 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced from their homes or fled in the fighting that accompanied Israel’s founding. Palestinians refer to that period as the Nakba, or catastrophe.
The forced displacement of Palestinians would rattle the US’s western allies, which have long supported a two-state solution to the protracted Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
The foreign ministry of Saudi Arabia, the Gulf power seen as Trump’s closest regional ally, rejected the displacement of Palestinians and said the kingdom’s “position on the establishment of a Palestinian state is firm and unwavering”.
In an apparent reference to normalisation talks between Saudi Arabia and Israel, widely expected to be a foreign policy priority for the Trump administration, the ministry added that Saudi Arabia “will not establish diplomatic relations with Israel” without an independent Palestinian state, whose capital is East Jerusalem.
The ministry stressed that its position on a Palestinian state was “non-negotiable and not subject to compromises”.
Apparently addressing Trump’s proposal for Gaza, Riyadh said a durable peace would be impossible unless Palestinians gained the rights promised to them under “international resolutions, as has been clarified to both the former and current US administrations”.
Exactly what American control of the Gaza Strip could look like was unclear on Tuesday evening.
Jonathan Panikoff, a former senior US intelligence official now at the Atlantic Council, said it would “require a probably decades-long commitment of tens of thousands of US troops” and would “bring to the mind both of Arab leaders and the street the unsuccessful US nation-state building in Iraq and Afghanistan”.
“We’ll see what our Arab friends say about that,” said Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a close Trump ally from South Carolina, of the news.
“I think most South Carolinians are probably not excited about sending Americans to take over Gaza. I think that might be problematic, but I’ll keep an open mind.”
Jordan’s King Abdullah will meet Trump next week in Washington to make his case against the resettlement of Palestinians outside Gaza.
Israel has reduced much of the densely populated strip to a rubble-strewn wasteland since it launched a ferocious retaliatory offensive after Hamas’s October 7 2023 attack.
Arab and European powers hope a fragile ceasefire and hostage deal between Israel and the Palestinian militant group will lead to a permanent end to the war and enable reconstruction of the strip to begin.
But Trump said: “If we can find the right piece of land, or numerous pieces of land, and build them some really nice places with plenty of money in the area . . . I think that would be a lot better than going back to Gaza, which has had just decades and decades of death.”
