The US will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with he too. We'll own it and be responsible for just.
That's President Donald Trump suggesting that the US take over the Gaza Strip.
We have an opportunity to do something that could be phenomenal. And I don't want to be cute, I don't want to be a wise guy. But the riviera of the Middle East, this could be something that could be so bad, This could be so magnificent.
But he made the extraordinary claim in a public announcement yesterday alongside the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump also said that Palestinians should be settled permanently somewhere else, an idea Arab nations including Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, as well as Palestinian leaders, have rejected from Schwarz Media. I'm Ruby Jones. This is seven AM today. Middle East correspondent for The Economist Greg Carlstrom on what Trump's plan for
Gaza means for the next phase of the ceasefire. It's Thursday, February sixth Greg. To begin with, could you just lay out for me what President Trump has said that he plans to do in Gaza.
The short answer is he said the United States plans to take over Gaza.
Lately, everybody I've spoken to loves the idea of the United States owning that piece of land developed.
He didn't obviously go into much detail because he's Donald Trump, but he talked about the US playing a lead role in cleaning all of the thousands and thousands of pounds of bombs that have not exploded over the past sixteen months, developing Gaza, rebuilding Gaza, creating economic opportunities there, and I think, perhaps most significantly, expelling the population of Gaza, removing Palestinians from Gaza.
Gazz is not a place for people to be living. And the only reason they want to go back, and I believe this strong is because they have no alternative. What's the alternative, go where there's no other alternative. If they had an alternative, they'd much rather not go back to Gaza and live in a beautiful alternative that's safe.
So, really doubling down on these remarks that he had made in previous days about trying to move Palestinians from Gaza into Egypt or Jordan or other countries.
And as someone who has followed this conflict closely for a long time. Waking up to hear this news, what did you think?
I mean? I was in disbelief. It is not what I was expecting to wake up and read. For a variety of reasons, I mean, one of them is just obviously how unworkable this plan is. Arab states have been unanimous in their combination of the idea of expelling Gaza's population. We've heard Egypt and Jordan both explicitly rule it out. Egypt has already taken about one hundred thousand, at least one hundred thousand Palestinians over the course of the war
in Gaza. They have not publicized it, but the Egyptian government absolutely does not want to take two million plus the entire population of Gaza, partly because Egyptians would see that as Egypt being complicit in what they would see is the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, and also because egypt the government would have security concerns about letting two million people into the country. The same goes for Jordan, which has a big Palestinian population, already has large populations of
Syrian refugees, Iraqi refugees. Jordanian Jordanians are very nervous about their minority position in the country and they don't want to add two million more Palestinians to the mix. So both of those governments have condemned it. The Jordanian Foreign Ministry said Jordan is for Jordanians, Palestine is for Palestinians,
very clear that they wouldn't accept it. And the Saudi Foreign Ministry put out a statement at about four point forty in the morning today condemning the idea and stating that it was still committed to the establishment of a Palestinian state. So no one in the region is going to go along with this idea.
Yeah, how significant is it that Saudi Arabia has said that it rejects this plan.
It's very significant. I mean, they are the most influential Arab country at the moment, and they are also the country that both the Trump administration and Israel are very keen to do some sort of bigger regional agreement with Trump wants to expand the Abraham Accords, the Arab Israeli normalization deals from his first term. He wants to get the Saudis to sign on to recognize Israel, to establish
a relationship with Israel. The Saudis have been saying for months they're not going to do that unless there is a clear pathway to the establishment of a Palestinian state, and obviously expelling two million Palestinians from Gaza conflicts with that vision. So what Trump is proposing here to the Saudis, not only do they reject Trump's proposal in Gaza, but they're saying it's going to jeopardize everything that he wants
to do with broader diplomacy in the Middle East. And simultaneously, while Trump is doing this, he's talking about defunding, shutting down USAID, the US International Development Agency, and then he comes out and proposes this massive development project in Gaza, which has been utterly devastated by war over the past sixteen months. It doesn't really seem to comport with the
America First agenda of the Trump administration. So in so many different ways, just the very surprising, let's say, proposal from the White.
House, and at the White House, standing alongside President Trump as he announced all of this was the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Can you tell me about what netnya who said, and how what Trump is proposing squares with what he has been trying to achieve. I've said this before.
You are the greatest friend Israel has ever had in the White House.
I think for Neettanielle. He came to Washington this week looking for an excuse not to continue this ceasefire in Gaza that took effect last month. He's very worried about what getting to Phase two of that agreement, which is meant to be a permanent end to the war in Gaza.
He's very worried about what that would mean for his domestic political circumstances, because some of his far right coalition partners have threatened to leave down the coalition, perhaps bring down the government if he goes ahead with the second stage of this ceasefire. So he's been looking for any excuse to delay the negotiations about Phase two, which were
meant to begin earlier this week. That was his priority, and there'd been some talk in recent days that he was encouraging Trump to go along with this idea of expelling Palestinians from Gaza as a negotiating employ as a way to perhaps get the Saudis to do a normalization deal with Israel, and then the Saudis could say, you know,
we prevented Palestinians from being expelled from Gaza. But I don't think he expected Trump to go nearly as far as he did with what sounds like a proposal to send American troops into Gaza.
Coming up after the break, Donald Trump's son in law and his plans for waterfront property in Gaza. Greg Donald Trump's idea to develop Gaza comes after his son in law, Dared Kushner, last year talked up the potential value of waterfront land on the Gaza.
Stream in Gaza's waterfront property. It could be very valuable too if people would focus on kind of building up, you know, livelihoods. You think about all the money.
So to what extent should we look at this as a case of Trump using the war there as a way to potentially further personal interests.
And this has been a long time fixation for Jared Kushner.
He had this bizarre conference all the way back in twenty nineteen in Bahrain where he invited businessmen from all over the world to come and talk about the economic opportunities in the Palestinian territories if there was some kind of peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians and at that conference, there was talk about, you know, Gaza having a tourism based economy and building luxury hotels on the waterfront and developing a marina and all that, you know
sort of things. So it's a personal interest of Kushner's obviously, that means it's a personal interest of Trump's as well. So you know, maybe there's a piece of that. I think you can also look at it in the context of he's been talking about trying to take over Greenland, He's been talking about wanting Canada to become the fifty first state. He seems to have this fixation on territorial expansion in his set and term, and this seems like a part of that as well.
And when Trump says that the US should quote own Gaza, I mean, this feels like a kind of ridiculous question to ask in some ways. But is that even like a legal possibility.
I mean, I don't think so. It's a very complicated legal possibility because it is not a sovereign state, right It is part of Palestine, which is recognized by the UN as a non member observer state, so it has a somewhat different legal status than sovereign states around the world. Obviously it's been under the control of a non state actor for twenty years, but it's now still occupied by
the Israeli military. I mean, I don't even know where you would begin trying to figure out the if you wanted to take this seriously, the legal ramifications of this idea.
And as you said, the say spy and Gaza was the central reason for the meeting between Trump and Netanyahu in the first place. It is set to expire soon on the first of March. So what does this meeting and everything that came out a bit mean for the chances of it continuing.
You know, there's there's almost an argument that you could make that these crazy comments from Trump give Nettayao away to get to the second phase of the ceasefire and to hold off his far right coalition partners. He can go back to Jerusalem now and he can say to Betslosmotrichi, tomar Ben Gavier, these hard right politicians in his coalition. You know, listen, Trump wants us to go to phase two, so we need to continue the ceasefire. But don't worry
about the implications of that. It doesn't mean that, you know, we're fully handing Gaza back over to Hamas that were going ahead with some kind of diplomatic process with the Palestinians. Don't worry about that because America is ultimately going to come in and expel everyone and take over the territory. So in a sense, he could have thrown Natanielle a
political lifeline here. The question is whether Natanielle wants to take it, whether he wants to come back and get to phase two and sort of stand up to his hard right coalition partners, and I'm not sure that he will.
He's always, you know, his his top priority. Natanielle's top priority is always his political survival, and sort of the path of least resistance for him in Israeli politics is to find a way to sink this deal in the next few weeks, resume the war in Gaza, keep his far right partners onside.
And I mean, does this signal to you that any hope of a two state solution is dead?
You know, I think any hope has been, if not dead, then on life support for years now. And I think there was a bit of optimism when Trump came in that, you know, perhaps he could take advantage of this opportunity where Hamas has been badly weakened in Gaza. Iran's other allies have been badly weakened, and Arab states we're begging
America to pursue some kind of diplomatic process. There was a bit of optimism that maybe Trump could capitalize on that and present a fair minded peace plan to Israel and the Palestinians. But if the idea is that his Middle East envoys are going to spend the next few months shuttling around the region trying to push this crazy idea of America taking over the Gaza strip, There's going to be no progress on a piece deal between Israel
and the Palestinians. There's going to be no progress on I think Arab Israeli normalization, bigger grand bargains in the region. I think it's going to obstruct anything he might want to do.
And what about for the people who are in Gaza right now, the one point eight million people who would be listening to this, what do you think that that would be?
Like?
Well, I think what is so depressing about all of this is, you know, when Trump and his aids say that life is miserable, is intolerable in Gaza right now, and people ought to live a better life, and they're right about that for two million people living in Gaza at the moment, they're going back to their home, some of them in northern Gaza, now that the ceasefire has
taken hold. They're discovering that there's nothing left. They're discovering that maybe they hope to leave the tent encampments where they've been trapped for a year, but they would be going back to places that have no electricity, have no running water, have no basic services. And so they're right when they talk about how difficult life is in Gaza.
But if their proposed solution to that is to expel two million people, for Palestinians, obviously this touches on a very deep historical memory of nineteen forty eight, what they call the Nakba, the catastrophe, the mass expulsion of Palestinians
that accompanied the creation of Israel. They are worried that even if America and the world tell them, listen, we're going to move you out of Gaza just temper rarely to rebuild it, but will allow you back, Palestinians are going to worry that they're never going to be allowed back, and they're going to be displaced off their land once again.
So they have these two horrible choices, one of which is Trump's expulsion proposal, the other of which is staying where they are, but staying in miserable conditions.
Greg, thank you so much for your time today.
Thank you.
Also in the news today, Prime Minister Anthony Alberzi has said he won't comment on Donald Trump's possible takeover and the leveling of Gaza.
Austrasi's position is the same as it was this morning, as it was last year, and it was ten years ago, and it was under the Howard government.
Anthony Albanesi says the government still supports a two state solution in the Middle East, a ceasefire, the release of hostages and aid to Gaza. And Matilda's captain Sam Kerr says she regrets a drunken dispute with London police that led to charges of racially aggravated harassment. Kerr called a London officer stupid and white following a dispute with a taxi driver. The jury in the trial has heard Kerr admit that she was drunk, angry and scared and should
have walked away from the situation. I'm Ruby Jones this is seven am. Thanks for listening.