Trump proposes U.S. control of Gaza

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So is it any surprise he can casually sit with the Jordanians and tell them to their faces "you are gonna take a couple of million Palestinians so we can build a luxury resort over their homes).

He can tell them that, but do you really think that they would be at all willing to accept them into their country?

It would take a whole lot of money to get them to take them. Money that us taxpayers would end up being on the hook for.

Knowing trump, he would deduct the cost of repatriation from foreign aid.

A list of more than 350 rabbis, Jewish creatives, and philanthropists have signed their names on a full-page ad in the New York Times, condemning US President Donald Trump’s proposed takeover of the Gaza Strip — effectively ethnically cleansing the enclave of its Palestinian population.

In addition to the rabbinical signatories, several Jewish celebrities have signed the list. Among the names include Eric Andre, Ilana Glazer, and Joaquin Phoenix.

The ad says, in large writing, “Trump has called for the removal of all Palestinians from Gaza. Jewish people say no to ethnic cleansing!”

According to a report published by The Guardian, Cody Edgerly, director of the In Our Name Campaign and one of the organizers of the ad, noted that it came at “a critical time as political redlines that were once thought immovable are rapidly shifting as the Trump-Netanyahu alliance takes hold again.”

n the report, Edgerly said that it was “heartening to witness such a rapid outpouring of support from across the denominational and political spectrum,” adding that “our message to Palestinians is that you are not alone, our attention has not wavered, and we are committed to fighting with every breath we have to stop ethnic cleansing in Gaza.”

Trump’s proposal has been compared to the 1948 Nakba and has led left-leaning Jewish clergy and leadership to also compare his calls to Hitler’s attempt to cleanse Germany of its Jewish population.

In the Guardian's report, the senior rabbi of congregation Dorshei Tzedek in Newton, Massachusetts, said, “We know as well as anyone the violence that these kinds of fantasies can lead to. It is time to make the ceasefire permanent, bring all of the hostages home, and join in efforts to rebuild Gaza for the sake of and with the people who live there.”

In an apparent softening of his proposal to take over the Gaza Strip, US President Donald Trump asserted Wednesday that the plan does not involve expelling Palestinians.

During a press spray with Ireland’s Prime Minister Michael Martin in the Oval Office, a reporter asked the Irish leader about Trump’s plan to “to expel Palestinians out of Gaza.”

“Nobody’s expelling any Palestinians,” Trump piped in

When Trump introduced the idea at the beginning of February during Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the White House, he said the Strip’s population of roughly 2 million people would be “permanently” relocated.

When pressed as to whether this would be done by force, Trump insisted that no Gazans actually want to remain in the war-torn Strip.

Trump’s refusal for the past month to clarify that the relocation of Gazans would be voluntary placed him to the right of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his hardline allies, who have insisted that Palestinians would not be forced to leave and that those interested in doing so would be supported.

Hamas spokesperson Hazem Qassem welcomed what he viewed as a retreat by Trump from his stance on relocating Gazans, urging him to refrain from aligning with the vision of the “extreme Zionist right.”

While Trump has stood by his plan more broadly, the work to implement it has been limited and several of his top advisers have insisted that the goal was largely to push Arab allies of the United States to come up with their own proposal for the post-war management of Gaza.

Egypt introduced its plan last week, which was endorsed by the Arab League during a summit in Cairo.

The plan envisions a temporary committee of independent Palestinian technocrats running Gaza for six months before handing off control over the enclave to the Palestinian Authority.

The proposal provides for international peacekeeping troops to be deployed in Gaza through a UN Security Council resolution. In the meantime, Egypt and Jordan would train Palestinian Authority police officers, so that they can then be dispatched to uphold law and order in Gaza.

The plan divides Gaza into seven different zones and envisions each being rebuilt consecutively in a manner that allows all Palestinians to remain in the Strip during the process. This crosses with comments from Trump and other US officials who insist that Gaza won’t be safe for Palestinians during the 10 to 15 years that it is being rebuilt.

The plan does not address Hamas by name, instead maintaining that the issue and fate of armed groups in Gaza can only be fully addressed through a political process that establishes a Palestinian state.

Still, the Arab League, in a statement endorsing the Egyptian plan, asserted that the security of Gaza “remains an exclusive responsibility of legitimate Palestinian institutions, in accordance with the principle of one law and one legitimate weapon” — indicating that the presence of armed groups other than the Palestinian Authority’s security forces would not be accepted.

The lack of explicit mention of Hamas and disarmament frustrated the Trump administration, which views the terror group’s removal from power as essential to ensuring that Gaza can be rebuilt and avoid returning to the cycle of war that has plagued the enclave for years.

The Trump administration is working on a plan to permanently relocate up to 1 million Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to Libya, five people with knowledge of the effort told NBC News.

The plan is under serious enough consideration that the administration has discussed it with Libya’s leadership, two people with direct knowledge of the plans and a former U.S. official said.

In exchange for the resettling of Palestinians, the administration would potentially release to Libya billions of dollars of funds that the U.S. froze more than a decade ago, those three people said.

No final agreement has been reached, and Israel has been kept informed of the administration’s discussions, the same three sources said.

The State Department and the National Security Council did not respond to multiple requests for comment before this article was published. After publication, a spokesperson told NBC News, “these reports are untrue.”

“The situation on the ground is untenable for such a plan. Such a plan was not discussed and makes no sense,” the spokesperson said.

Basem Naim, a senior Hamas official, said that Hamas, the U.S.-designated terrorist group that has run Gaza, was not aware of any discussions about moving Palestinians to Libya.

“Palestinians are very rooted in their homeland, very strongly committed to the homeland and they are ready to fight up to the end and to sacrifice anything to defend their land, their homeland, their families, and the future of their children,” Naim said in response to questions from NBC News. “[Palestinians] are exclusively the only party who have the right to decide for the Palestinians, including Gaza and Gazans, what to do and what not to do.”

Representatives of the Israeli government declined to comment.

Libya has been plagued by instability and warring political factions throughout the nearly 14 years since a civil war broke out in the country and its longtime dictator, Moammar Gadhafi, was toppled. Libya is struggling to care for its current population as two rival governments, one in the west led by Abdul Hamid Dbeibah and one in the east led by Khalifa Haftar, are actively and violently fighting for control. The State Department currently advises Americans not to travel to Libya “due to crime, terrorism, unexploded landmines, civil unrest, kidnapping, and armed conflict.”

Dbeibah’s government could not be reached for comment. Haftar’s Libyan National Army did not respond to a request for comment.

How many Palestinians in Gaza would voluntarily leave to live in Libya is an open question. One idea administration officials have discussed is to provide Palestinians with financial incentives such as free housing and even a stipend, the former U.S. official said.

The details of when or how any plan to relocate Palestinians to Libya could be implemented are murky, and an effort to resettle up to 1 million people there would likely face significant obstacles.

Such an effort would likely be extremely expensive, and it’s not clear how the Trump administration would seek to pay for it. In the past, the administration has said Arab nations would help with rebuilding Gaza after the war there ends, but they have been critical of Trump’s idea of permanently relocating Palestinians.

In recent weeks, the Trump administration has also looked at Libya as a place where it could send some immigrants it wants to deport from the U.S. However, plans to send one group of immigrants to Libya were stalled by a federal judge this month.

Moving up to 1 million Palestinians to Libya could put far more of a strain on the fragile country.

The CIA’s most recent publicly available estimate of Libya’s current population is about 7.36 million. In terms of population, Libya absorbing 1 million more people would be equivalent to the U.S. taking in about 46 million.

Precisely where Palestinians would be resettled in Libya has not been determined, according to the former U.S. official. Administration officials are looking at options for housing them and every potential method for transporting them from Gaza to Libya — by air, land and sea —is being considered, according to one of the people with direct knowledge of the effort.

Any of those methods would likely prove cumbersome and time-consuming, as well as costly.

It would take around 1,173 flights on the world’s largest passenger airplane, the Airbus A380, at its maximum passenger capacity to transport 1 million people, for instance. With no airport in Gaza, moving anyone from there on flights would first require transporting them to an airport in the region. If Israel does not want to allow Palestinians to come through its territory, the closest airport would be in Cairo, about 200 miles away.

Transportation by land from Gaza through Egypt to Benghazi, Libya’s second-largest city, which is farther east than the capital, Tripoli, would require driving about 1,300 miles. Automobiles typically hold fewer passengers than other modes of transportation. About 55 people can fit in an intercity passenger bus.

Up to 2,000 people can fit on the top-end versions of some of the ferries the U.S. used to transport civilians along the Mediterranean Sea to escape Libya’s civil war in 2011. If those vessels were to be used — and assuming that they didn’t need to refuel and weather conditions were good — it would take hundreds of trips lasting more than a day each way for up to 1 million people to travel from Gaza to Benghazi.