Could Trump’s Gaza plan be negotiating tactic for Saudi-Israel deal?
On a visit to the White House, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu surely didn't imagine that President Donald Trump would propose the United States take over responsibility for managing and reconstructing the Gaza Strip.
TEL AVIV — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came away from Tuesday’s White House meeting with President Donald Trump with a bonanza.
Trump offered not only to take the teeming, devastated Gaza Strip off Israel’s hands, but also to rid the enclave of its 2 million Palestinian residents and develop the Mediterranean coastal enclave into a Middle East paradise.
While most of the world, certainly the Arab world, reacted to Trump’s declaration with shock and fury, the hard-line linchpins of Netanyahu’s government were gleeful. The Religious Zionism party of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and the Jewish Power party of former National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir have long schemed to empty Gaza and the West Bank of their Palestinian residents to end aspirations of a Palestinian state.
But even they surely never imagined that the radical idea would be so warmly embraced by the new empire-building president of the United States. Ben-Gvir quickly announced that he would likely return to the government he quit last month in protest of Netanyahu buckling to US pressure and ending the war in Gaza before Hamas was crushed.
