Consider This from NPR
Trump's Plan for Gaza: American intervention and mass relocation
Wed, 05 Feb 2025
President Trump floated two stunning ideas about Gaza on Tuesday. The first is he said the U.S. would take over the territory, which has been devastated by the recent war.And, he said the entire population of Gaza would be relocated to other countries. Trump offered no specifics for his plans sending Palestinians and Israelis scrambling to understand what he means.President Trump's vague plan to "Make Gaza Beautiful Again" could signal the largest shift in US-Middle East policy in decades and could upend widespread hope for a Palestinian state alongside Israel. For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.orgEmail us at [email protected] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What are Trump's proposals for Gaza?
Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal, and now... The U.S.
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.
That's right, Gaza. It's an addition to the growing list reflecting President Donald Trump's expansionist vision. The president did not offer many specifics for his Gaza plan, nor did he rule out the possibility of deploying U.S. troops to make it happen.
Trump made that announcement standing next to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who offered no details of his own, only smiles and praise for Trump.
I believe, Mr. President, that your willingness to puncture conventional thinking, thinking that has failed time and time and time again, your willingness to think outside the box with fresh ideas, will help us achieve all these goals.
President Trump called Gaza a demolition site and a symbol of death and destruction.
The only reason the Palestinians want to go back to Gaza is they have no alternative.
And so he floated another idea.
We should go to other countries. of interest with humanitarian hearts, and there are many of them that want to do this and build various domains that will ultimately be occupied by the 1.8 million Palestinians living in Gaza.
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Chapter 2: How did Netanyahu and other leaders react to Trump's plan?
That was NPR's Daniel Estrin reporting from Tel Aviv. In the first major Israeli-Arab war in 1948, many Palestinians were driven from their homes and sought shelter in Gaza. The direct descendants of those refugees make up most of Gaza's population today. So President Trump struck an extremely sensitive nerve when he called for uprooting all Palestinians in Gaza.
NPR's Greg Myrie has made dozens of reporting trips to Gaza. We reached him in Damascus, Syria. Walk us back in the history and explain in a little more detail why so many Palestinian refugees came to be concentrated in this tiny strip, the Gaza Strip.
Yeah, the 1948 war was really the critical moment. Israel had just declared statehood and was immediately at war with several Arab countries as well as the Palestinians who didn't have a state then or now. Hundreds of thousands of civilians fled or were driven from their homes, and many are Palestinians who went to Gaza.
So now you have this large refugee population, and the very young, new United Nations sets up a refugee agency just for the Palestinians, which helps the Palestinian refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, and neighboring countries.
This same arrangement has remained in place to this day, and the descendants of those original refugees are still classified as refugees, even if they were born in Gaza and have lived there all their lives.
Understanding that there's, of course, a range of views, if Palestinians in Gaza had their choice, how would they like to see this resolved?
Certainly the dream for many has been to return to their former homes, which are now inside Israel's internationally recognized borders. In Gaza and other areas, Palestinians will often show you around their homes and they'll proudly display these large, oversized, rusting keys and yellowing land deed documents to those former family homes.
But Israel's always rejected a large-scale return of Palestinian refugees, saying it would be swamped demographically. And during periodic peace talks over the years, the focus has been on making Gaza part of a Palestinian state that would also include the West Bank and a capital in East Jerusalem.
So when President Trump comes along and says Palestinians in Gaza should be uprooted because the U.S. is going to take over, based on your experience, is there any reason to think some Palestinians would be willing to leave Gaza?
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