President Donald Trump, seated Tuesday next to visiting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, reiterated his proposal to move Palestinians out of war-torn Gaza to another country and to build them new homes there.
The idea of relocating Palestinians is so controversial as to be virtually radioactive; no Israeli leader, except for those on the far right, would have dared suggest such an idea in public for fear of being accused of “transfer” or “genocide.”
However, Trump broke that taboo several days ago, pointing to the simple impracticality of rebuilding Gaza after its near-destruction in war after war launched by Palestinian terror groups, including the war that has followed Hamas’s terror attack of October 7, 2024.
On Tuesday, after praising Netanyahu for doing a “great job,” and saying that they made an “unbeatable” combination of leaders, Trump again emphasized the idea of moving Palestinians out of Gaza.
He said:
I think that Gaza maybe is a demolition site right now. If you look at Gaza it’s all — I mean, it’s hardly a building standing, and the ones that are are going to collapse. You can’t live in Gaza right now. And I think we need another location. I think it should be a location that’s going to make people happy. You look over over the decades, it’s all death in Gaza. This has been happening for years. It’s all death. If we can get a beautiful area to resettle people permanently in nice homes, where they can be happy and not be shot, not be killed, not be knifed to death, like what’s happening in Gaza. And right now you have in Gaza a very dangerous situation in terms of explosives all over the place, in terms of tunnels that nobody knows who’s in the tunnel. The whole thing is a mess. … Gaza is not a place for people to be living, and the only reason they want to go back, and I believe this strongly, is because they have no alternative. … It would be my hope that we could do something really nice, really good … if we can build them through massive amounts of money supplied by other people, very rich nations, and they’re willing to supply it, if we can build something for them — and one of the countries — and it could be Jordan, and it could be Egypt, it could be other countries, and you could build four or five or six areas. It doesn’t have to be one area, but you take certain areas, and you build really good, quality housing, like a beautiful town, like someplace where they can live and not die. Because Gaza is a guarantee that they’re going to end up dying. The same thing is going to happen again.
Trump also said that he believed Palestinians could be moved to countries “where the leaders currently say no.” He cited the initial reluctance of Mexico and Canada to help the U.S. on migration, which changed under threat of tariffs.
Asked how many Palestinians he proposed moving, Trump said: “All of them.” He also said that it could be a smaller amount of Palestinians, perhaps 1.7 million or 1.8 million out of the 2 million inhabitants currently in Gaza.
Trump was unclear about whether he would support the idea of Israelis reestablishing the settlements that Israel abandoned and uprooted in 2005 during the “disengagement” from Gaza, now regarded as a strategic failure.
Egypt and Jordan have resisted accepted any Palestinian refugees from Gaza — even on a temporary basis — but as Breitbart News first reported, Israel is considering suggesting Indonesia instead, which has uninhabited islands.
There was no evident tension between Trump and Netanyahu, despite past differences over the 2020 election result.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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