National security adviser Mike Waltz said Wednesday that President Trump’s shocking announcement a day earlier that the United States should “take over” the Gaza Strip will push Israel’s Arab neighbors to propose a solution of their own to the humanitarian crisis in the Hamas-run enclave.
Much of the territory has been reduced to hazardous rubble as a result of Israel’s war against the terror group, and the White House estimated earlier Tuesday that it would take at least 10 years for Gaza to become properly livable again.
Waltz told CBS News that while “everybody’s heart breaks for the Palestinian people across the region and rightly so,” the president has seen no other “realistic solutions on how those miles and miles and miles of debris” and unexploded bombs will be cleared to make the area livable within the next decade or more.
“I think [Trump’s plan] is going to bring the entire region to come [up] with their own solutions,” added Waltz, a former congressman from Florida.
Hours before Trump made the bombshell statement at a joint news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the president had said Gazans would leave the 140-square-mile territory “if they had alternatives.”
“I would like to see Jordan, I’d like to see Egypt take some” people, Trump said, floating the idea of Saudi Arabia covering the financial tab for resettlement.
“I think they’d love to leave Gaza if they had an option,” Trump said. “Right now they don’t have an option … The whole place is demolished. It’s unsafe, it’s unsanitary. It’s not a place where people want to live.”
An unnamed US official told Axios that Trump presented the US plan as a last resort after believing no regional powers had offered any new options for handling the situation.
On Monday, White House Middle East envoy Morgan Ortagus told a group of Arab ambassadors who opposed relocating the Gazans that Trump did not want to hear a blanket “No” in response to the proposal— but wanted neighboring states to present their own solutions, the same outlet reported.
Jordan and Egypt have flatly rejected the idea of taking in refugees when it has been proposed by the White House in the past, while a US official told Axios that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was stunned by the president’s Tuesday announcement and “doesn’t want to be seen as being part of what Trump is talking about.”
On Wednesday morning, Trump insisted to reporters in the Oval Office that “everybody loves” his vision for Gaza, but declined to take detailed questions about the proposal, saying that “this is just not the right time.”
