New Delhi: US President Donald Trump on Tuesday said that the United States will “take over and own” the war-ravaged Gaza Strip. “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,” Trump said during a joint press conference with Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “If it’s necessary, we’ll do that, we’re going to take over that piece, we’re going to develop it, create thousands and thousands of jobs, and it’ll be something that the entire Middle East can be very proud of,” Trump added. When asked who would live there, Trump suggested it could become a home for “the world’s people” and predicted it might evolve into “the Riviera of the Middle East.”
Trump also underlined that he and Netanyahu discussed rooting out Hamas. Both leaders focused their closed-door meeting on discussing strategies to eliminate Hamas and restore peace to the “troubled region”. Netanyahu said Trump was “thinking outside the box with fresh ideas” and was “showing willingness to puncture conventional thinking”.
Trump said he wanted to bring great stability to that part of the Middle East, while adding that he had talked to regional leaders and they backed the idea. “I’ve studied this very closely over a lot of months,” he stressed, stating he would visit Gaza but didn’t mention when.
‘Egypt, Jordan would take in Palestinians from Gaza Strip’
During the joint press conference, Trump slammed his predecessor, Joe Biden, pointing out that, “Nobody did anything for four years in the Middle East except demonstrate incompetence”. He said Palestinians in Gaza Strip should be housed in “various domains” in other countries.
Trump reportedly maintained that Egypt and Jordan would take in Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, while brushing aside their stated objections to accepting people from the war-ravaged region. “They say they’re not going to accept — I say they will,” Trump asserted. Since his comeback to office, this was Trump’s first meeting with a foreign leader at the White House.
Rethinking an independent Palestine
On Tuesday, Trump suggested that he may be reconsidering an independent Palestine as part of a wider two-state solution to the raging Israel-Palestinian conflict. “Well, a lot of plans change with time,” he responded when asked if he remained committed to a plan like the one he proposed in 2020, which called for a Palestinian state.
Trump said, “A lot of death has occurred since I left and now came back. Now we are faced with a situation that’s different — in some ways better and in some ways worse. But we are faced with a very complex and difficult situation that we’ll solve.”
