President Trump on Friday appeared to back off his demand that some two million Palestinians be permanently relocated from the Gaza Strip to nearby countries in the Middle East so the United States could take over the territory and develop it into “the Riviera of the Middle East.”
Earlier this month, the president said he favored taking control of Gaza and displacing the Palestinian population of the devastated seaside enclave. Over the course of several days, he repeatedly waved aside objections to the idea, including flat-out rejections from the leaders of Egypt and Jordan.
At the time, Mr. Trump said that he would be able to persuade the leaders of those two countries — and potentially others in the region — to accept the Palestinians through the force of his will.
“They say they’re not going to accept,” Mr. Trump said. “I say they will.”
But in a telephone interview with a Fox News host on Friday, Mr. Trump seemed to concede that his efforts at persuasion had failed and the refusal by Egypt and Jordan to accept displaced Gazans would make the idea unworkable.
“Well, we pay Jordan and Egypt billions of dollars a year. And I was a little surprised they’d say that, but they did,” Mr. Trump told the Fox News host Brian Kilmeade before adding: “I’ll tell you, the way to do it is my plan. I think that’s the plan that really works. But I’m not forcing it. I’m just going to sit back and recommend it.”
The comments were a striking reversal for one of the most brazen foreign policy proposals ever made by a sitting president. And they came after weeks of back-and-forth that included several high-ranking Trump administration officials trying to downplay the proposal, followed by the president insisting that he was serious.
Mr. Trump first publicly raised the idea in early February, when he declared that “The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip.” With Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel by his side during a White House visit, Mr. Trump said the United States would “own it and be responsible” for disposing of unexploded munitions and rebuilding Gaza into a mecca for jobs and tourism, pledging that it would become “the Riviera of the Middle East.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said soon after that any relocation would be temporary. But Mr. Trump followed up with a social media posting suggesting again that Palestinians would be relocated into communities where they would be “happy, safe, and free.”
In the interview on Friday, the president said that trying to redevelop Gaza without moving Palestinians out would be impractical, in part because of the presence of Hamas terrorists, who have ruled in Gaza for decades. He said that a U.S. takeover, and the displacement of Gaza’s Palestinians, would be the best approach.
“The U.S. would own the site,” Mr. Trump said. “It’d be no Hamas, and it’d be developed, and you start all over again with a clean plate.”
But he spoke of the idea in past tense, suggesting that he had given up on it.
“I liked my plan. I thought my plan was good,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Kilmeade. “You get them out, you move them, you build a beautiful community and a permanent community.”
Leaders from across the Arab world met Friday in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, to discuss possible alternatives to Mr. Trump’s plans ahead of a broader Arab League summit in Egypt on March 4. The meeting ended without any official statement of what was discussed or decided.
In Washington, a spokesman for the National Security Council did not respond to emails seeking comment on whether the president’s remarks indicated that he was giving up on the idea of the United States rebuilding Gaza.
In the interview, Mr. Trump seemed resigned to the reality that Gaza would have to be rebuilt without U.S. ownership and without moving its people out, though he also appeared to interpret Israel’s long occupation of the territory as ownership.
“We’ll see what happens,” he said. “I thought it was great, because the location is, you know, it’s a great location. I don’t know why Israel ever gave that up. Why did they give it up?”
Ismaeel Naar contributed reporting from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
