Trump’s Gaza plan has staggered the world. Did he mean it? For now, that doesn’t matter | Martin Kettle
The president’s appalling threat to seize Gaza and drive out its people imperils global stability, even if he never deploys a single US soldier
The comments were brazen, swaggering, jaw-dropping, audacious, and, to many, simply outrageous. “Stupéfaction mondiale” was how the French paper Libération responded on Wednesday morning. The sober-sided New York Times contented itself with “improbable”. A US senator gave voice to what will surely become a drumbeat charge across the Middle East and beyond in the hours and days to come, that what Donald Trump had said about Gaza amounted to “ethnic cleansing by another name”.
On Tuesday, at the end of his White House meeting with Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, President Trump declared that the US should seize control of the Gaza Strip and permanently remove its 2.2 million Palestinian inhabitants to resettlement in places such as Egypt and Jordan. The US would “own it and be responsible”, said Trump. “We’ll take it over and develop it,” he added. There would be “unlimited numbers of jobs and housing” for “the people of the area” – though which people they would be was not specified. Gaza would be turned into “the Riviera of the Middle East”.
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