Trump’s Gaza plan will be seen as flying in face of international law

Since the 7 October 2023 attacks on Israel, these groups – leaders of whom have been part of Netanyahu’s coalition – have demanded the war against Hamas continues indefinitely, vowing ultimately to re-establish Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip.

They have continued their calls and opposed the current ceasefire and hostage release deal.

In his White House press conference with the Israeli prime minister, Trump went further even than his recent growing calls for the Palestinians in Gaza to be “relocated” to Egypt and Jordan, saying that the United States would then take the territory over and rebuild it.

When asked whether Palestinians would be allowed back, he said “the world’s people” would live there, saying it would be an “international, unbelievable place”, before adding “also Palestinians”.

His Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff earlier in the day summed up much of the tone around the proposal, saying of Trump “this guy knows real estate”.

Trump said it would be the “Riviera of the Middle East”.

Asked whether American troops would be involved in the take over of Gaza, Mr Trump said “we’ll do what is necessary”.

His proposals amount to the most radical transformation in the US position on the territory since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 and the war of 1967, which saw the start of Israel’s military occupation of land including the Gaza Strip.

Gaza was already home to Palestinians who fled or were forced from their homes in the wars surrounding Israel’s creation.

They and their descendants make up the vast majority of Gaza’s population to this day.

Trump’s proposals, if enacted, would involve that population, now more than two million people, being forced elsewhere in the Arab world or even beyond, says Trump, to “resettle… permanently”.

The proposals would wipe out the possibility of a future two-state solution in any conventional sense and will be categorically rejected by Palestinians and the Arab world as an expulsion plan.

Much of Netanyahu’s political base and the ultranationalist settler movement in Israel will champion President Trump’s words, seeing them as the fulfilment of a means as Netanyahu puts it to stop “Gaza being a threat to Israel”.

For ordinary Palestinians, it would amount to a mass act of collective punishment.