Audio excerpt — Donald Trump:

“The US will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it, too. We'll own it and be responsible for…”

RUBY:

That's President Donald Trump suggesting that the US “take over” the Gaza strip.

Audio excerpt — Donald Trump:

“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 magnificent.”

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RUBY:

He made the extraordinary claim in a public announcement yesterday, alongside the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanayahu.

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 Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones. This is 7am.

Today, Middle East Correspondent for The Economist Gregg Carlstrom on what Trump’s plan for Gaza means for the next phase of the ceasefire.

It’s Thursday, February 6.

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RUBY:

Gregg, to begin with, could you just lay out for me what President Trump has said that he plans to do in Gaza?

GREGG:

The short answer is, he said, the United States plans to take over Gaza.

Audio excerpt — Donald Trump:

“Everybody I've spoken to loves the idea of the United States owning that piece of land.”

GREGG:

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.

Audio excerpt — Donald Trump:

“Gaza is not a place for people to be living. And the only reason they want to go back and I believe this strongly 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.”

GREGG:

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.

RUBY:

And as someone who has followed this conflict closely for a long time, waking up to hear this news, what did you think?

GREGG:

I mean, I was in disbelief. It is not what I was expecting to to wake up and read this 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 condemnation of the idea of expelling Gaza's population. We've heard Egypt and Jordan both explicitly rule it out.

Egypt has already taken about 100,000, at least 100,000 Palestinians over the course of the war in Gaza. They have not publicised that but the Egyptian government absolutely does not want to take 2 million plus, the entire population of Gaza, partly because Egyptians would see that as Egypt being complicit in what they would see as the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. And also because Egypt, the government would have security concerns about letting 2 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, Jordanians are very nervous about their minority position in the country. And they don't want to add 2 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 that.

The Saudi foreign ministry put out a statement at about 4:40am 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.

RUBY:

Yeah, how significant is it that Saudi Arabia has said that it rejects this plan?

GREGG:

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 normalisation deals from his first term. He wants to get the Saudis to sign on to recognise 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 2 million Palestinians from Gaza conflicts with that vision. So what Trump is proposing here, according to the Saudis, not only do they reject Trump's proposal in Gaza, but they're saying it's going to jeopardise 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, you know, 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.

RUBY:

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 Netanyahu said and how what Trump is proposing squares with what he has been trying to achieve?

Audio excerpt — Benjamin Netanyahu:

“I’ve said this before and I’l say it again. You are the greatest friend Israel has ever had in the White House.”

GREGG:

I think for Netanyahu, he came to Washington this week looking for an excuse not to continue the 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 the 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 had 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 ploy, as a way to perhaps get the Saudis to do a normalisation 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.

RUBY:

Coming up after the break, Donald Trump’s son in law and his plans for waterfront property in Gaza.

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RUBY:

Gregg, Donald Trump's idea to develop or develop Gaza comes after his son in law, Jared Kushner last year talked up the potential value of waterfront land on the Gaza Strip.

Audio excerpt — Jared Kushner:

“Gaza's waterfront property, it could be very valuable if people would focus on kind of building up livelihoods. If you think about all the money that has gone into this…”

RUBY:

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?

GREGG:

And this has been a longtime fixation for Jared Kushner. He had this bizarre conference all the way back in 2019 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 sort of thing. 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 51st state. He seems to have this fixation on territorial expansion in his second term and this seems like a part of that as well.

RUBY:

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?

GREGG:

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 recognised 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 20 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, if you wanted to take this seriously, the legal ramifications of this idea.

RUBY:

And as you said, the ceasefire in Gaza was the central reason for the meeting between Trump and Netanyahu in the first place. It is set to expire soon on the 1st of March. So what does this meeting and everything that came out of it mean for the chances of it continuing?

GREGG:

You know, there's almost an argument that you could make that these crazy comments from Trump give Netanyahu a way to get to the second phase of the cease fire and to hold off his far right coalition partners. He can go back to Jerusalem now and he can say to Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben-Gvir 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 we're 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 Netanyahu a political lifeline here. The question is whether Netanyahu 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 top priority, Netanyahu'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.

RUBY:

And does this signal to you that any hope of a two state solution is dead?

GREGG:

You know, I think any hope has been, if not dead, then 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 were begging America to pursue some kind of diplomatic process. There was a bit of optimism that maybe Trump could capitalise 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 peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians. There's going to be no progress on, I think, Arab-Israeli normalisation, bigger grand bargains in the region. I think it's going to obstruct anything he might want to do.

RUBY:

And what about for the people who are in Gaza right now, the 1.8 million people who would be listening to this. What do you think that that would be like?

GREGG:

Well, I think what is so depressing about all of this is, you know, when Trump and his aides 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 2 million people living in Gaza at the moment, they're going back to their homes, some of them in northern Gaza, now that the cease fire 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 2 million people, for Palestinians, obviously this touches on a very deep historical memory of 1948, 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 temporarily to rebuild that, but we'll 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.

RUBY:

Gregg, thank you so much for your time today.

GREGG:

Thank you.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today,

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has said he won't comment on Donald Trump's possible "takeover" and the "levelling" of Gaza.

Audio excerpt — Prime Minister Anthony Albanese:

"...Australia's position is the same as it was this morning, as it was last year, as it was 10 years ago, and it was under the Howard government."

RUBY:

Anthony Albanese 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 7am. Thanks for listening.

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