The Trump White House / Wikimedia Commons
CV NEWS FEED // President Donald Trump Thursday morning clarified his Tuesday announcement that the United States “will take over the Gaza Strip” – explaining that he intends to give Gazans “a chance to be happy, safe, and free.”
“The Gaza Strip would be turned over to the United States by Israel at the conclusion of fighting,” the president stated on social media. “The Palestinians, people like Chuck Schumer, would have already been resettled in far safer and more beautiful communities, with new and modern homes, in the region.”
Trump’s reference to the Democratic Senate Minority leader was likely in reference to viral comments the president made last year during his successful campaign for the White House.
Trump stated that, under his plan, the Palestinian people “would actually have a chance to be happy, safe, and free.”
“The U.S., working with great development teams from all over the World, would slowly and carefully begin the construction of what would become one of the greatest and most spectacular developments of its kind on Earth,” he went on. “No soldiers by the U.S. would be needed! Stability for the region would reign!!!”
At a Tuesday press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump said that the United States “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, level the site, and get rid of the destroyed buildings,” Trump said at the time, “level it out and create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area.”
During a Wednesday interview with CBS, Trump’s National Security Advisor (NSA) Michael Waltz explained the current situation in Gaza and the president’s proposed solution for the people living in the war-torn territory.
“You have literally nearly two million people living in a place that has thousands and thousands of unexploded ordnance and bombs,” Waltz said. “It’s in some places like a minefield. You have buildings that are collapsing and unsafe. You have no sewage.”
He stressed that the Gaza Strip has “become completely unlivable with this war.”
“I think what the president is just acknowledging,” Waltz continued, “is that we’ve been looking at this over the last weeks and months … Everybody’s heart breaks for the Palestinian people across the region and rightly so.”
However, Trump “is not seeing any realistic solutions on how those miles and miles and miles of debris are going to be cleared, how those essentially unexploded bombs are going to be removed, how these people are physically going to live for at least a decade if not longer it’s going to take to do this,” the Walz said.
“So, the fact that nobody has a realistic solution and he puts some very bold, fresh, new ideas out on the table,” Waltz added, referring to Trump, “I don’t think should be criticized in any way.”
“I think it’s going to bring the entire region to come with their own solutions,” he added.
Waltz is a colonel in the Army Special Forces (a unit commonly called the “Green Berets”), a former U.S. representative from Florida, and has served on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
The Gaza Strip, or Gaza, is the smaller of two Palestinian territories, along with the much larger West Bank. The radical Islamist terrorist group Hamas has been the de facto government of Gaza since 2007.
Gaza is less than half the size of New York City. The territory is bordered by Israel to the north and east, Egypt to the south, and the Mediterranean Sea to the west. Its population of 2.14 million is almost entirely Muslim.
Israel and Hamas have been at war since Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel October 7, 2023. A ceasefire was negotiated between the two sides in part by Trump’s Special Envoy to the Middle East Steven Witkoff just before Trump took office.
The war has claimed the lives of over 70,000 Gazans and wounded more than 100,000.
