President Donald Trump’s comments about the U.S. ‘taking over’ Gaza sent shock waves through Washington – but allies suggest the negotiator-in-chief is using the suggestion as a tactic to apply pressure on the region and find workable solutions to the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
‘The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it, too,’ Trump said Tuesday in remarks that set off a media firestorm. ‘We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous, unexplored bombs and other weapons on the site.’
He suggested that Palestinians be cleared out of Gaza and taken in by neighboring nations like Egypt and Jordan – an idea Arab leaders have roundly rejected.
Trump’s proposal would be a momentous departure from current policy – and run afoul with America First conservatives who want to see the U.S. less involved in the Middle East, not more.
‘I thought we voted for America First,’ Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., wrote back to the president’s suggestion on X. ‘We have no business contemplating yet another occupation to doom our treasure and spill our soldiers’ blood.’
The idea of a U.S. takeover of Gaza originated with Trump himself, who questioned why Palestinians would want to live among the rubble, and was not formally mapped out by his aides before he announced it next to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House.
Sources told the New York Times that Trump had been toying with the suggestion for weeks, and his thinking was reaffirmed when Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff returned from Gaza and described the dismal conditions there.
Taking over ownership of Gaza would suggest U.S. forces on the ground to ensure security – and require Congress to get on board with appropriating funds to rebuild the territory.
Trump explained his idea further in a Truth Social post Thursday morning.
‘The Gaza Strip would be turned over to the United States by Israel at the conclusion of fighting. The Palestinians, people like Chuck Schumer, would have already been resettled in far safer and more beautiful communities, with new and modern homes, in the region,’ he wrote, calling out the Senate’s Jewish Democratic leader.
‘They would actually have a chance to be happy, safe, and free. The U.S., working with great development teams from all over the World, would slowly and carefully begin the construction of what would become one of the greatest and most spectacular developments of its kind on Earth. No soldiers by the U.S. would be needed! Stability for the region would reign!!!’
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt also sought to quiet fears from the briefing podium.
‘I would reject the premise of your question that this forces the United States to be entangled in conflicts abroad,’ she told a reporter on Wednesday. ‘The president has not committed to putting boots on the ground in Gaza. He has also said that the United States is not going to pay for the rebuilding of Gaza.’
‘This is an out-of-the-box idea. That’s who President Trump is. That’s why the American people elected him. And his goal is lasting peace in the Middle East for all people in the region.’
Sen. John Fetterman, a Pennsylvania Democrat who typically finds little common cause with Trump, told Puck News his idea is a ‘provocative’ way to ‘to kind of shake things up and to start a very more honest conversation of Gaza.’
‘Trump is speaking the language of the Middle East,’ Simone Ledeen, deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East during Trump’s first term, told Fox News Digital.
‘Middle East negotiations, they often happen in public, and public posturing is kind of part of the process. This is not President Trump’s messaging to the U.S., he is messaging to the Middle East… [that] the paradigm has failed, and so we need new ideas.’
‘I think it’s going to bring the entire region to come with their own solutions,’ national security advisor Mike Waltz mused about the comments on CBS on Wednesday.
Waltz went on: ‘He’s not seeing any realistic solutions on how those miles and miles and miles of debris are going to be clear, how those essentially unexploded bombs are going to be removed, how these people are physically going to live there for at least a decade, if not longer, it’s going to take to do this.’
More than 46,000 Palestinians had been killed in the war between Israel and Hamas, according to the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry as of last month. Nearly 2 million have been displaced from their homes.
An Israeli official suggested that Trump’s idea may not actually be met with opposition by Gaza’s neighbors.
‘Egypt and Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates that in the end of the day are threatened by Hamas would not shed a tear to see that the United States is actually taking control over the Gaza strip, because they don’t really want to do that,’ Avi Melamed, a former Israeli intelligence official and Arab affairs adviser for Jerusalem, told Fox News Digital.
‘They will not, of course, express formally, because it will be breaking the cause of unity in the Arab world.’
‘Trump is being presented right now a construct of a ceasefire deal that is headed for a train wreck,’ said Rich Goldberg, president of Foundation for Defense of Democracies, adding that there is a ‘fundamental disconnect’ between what Israelis will accept and what Hamas will accept.
‘So he’s moving the Overton window, changing the strategic paradigm.’
Goldberg said the first priority was convincing other Muslim nations in the region to take in Palestinians.
‘The Egyptians and the Jordanians should be honest with the world. We don’t want the Gaza population. We’re afraid of the Gaza population. We think they may be radicalized. We think they might bring down our government. Or we don’t want to give up the political weapon against Israel.’ He suggested Trump could leverage U.S. relationships with Middle Eastern countries – offering those who accept Palestinians major-non-NATO status and threatening to revoke such a status for countries who don’t. ‘The status itself is gravitized in the world.’