Not On My Bingo Card

As I previewed the Trump/Netanyahu meeting and all the topics to be discussed with President Trump taking over Gaza wasn’t one of them. Yet at a press conference standing next to Prime Minister Netanyahu Trump dropped a political bomb of his own as we see in a report from The Times Of Israel:

US President Donald Trump on Tuesday declared his desire for the United States to “take over” and “own” the Gaza Strip, again stunning a global audience hours after doing so with his call for permanently relocating the coastal enclave’s entire population.

For those who don’t know what he really meant, this quote is pretty clear:

“The US will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it too. We’ll own it,” Trump said in prepared remarks at the start of a joint press conference with visiting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after the two leaders met in the Oval Office.

As I previously reported one of the main topics to be discussed was moving to the second phase of the current ceasefire deal:

There had been speculation that Trump would use his Tuesday meeting with Netanyahu to urge him to commit to carrying out the second phase of the ongoing Gaza ceasefire and hostage release deal. The prime minister is under pressure from his far-right coalition partners to resume fighting at the conclusion of the first phase next month.

The US president threw that notion a curve no one saw coming:

But Trump avoided publicly leaning on Netanyahu at all, instead praising his leadership and seemingly offering him a political lifeline by getting fully behind an idea — emptying Gaza — that has long been endorsed by the Israeli far right and thereby giving ultranationalist lawmakers an incentive to keep the government intact.

The proposal also seemed likely to swing focus away from the hostage talks, or at least shake them up.

Trump essentially assured Israel that ending the war would mean Hamas would not play any role in Gaza because the US would be there. Hamas’s only win if there is one is that they will live to fight another say, but it won’t be from the Gaza Strip:

Israel and Hamas are set to begin negotiations this week on the terms of the second phase of the ceasefire in Gaza, which is supposed to see the release of the remaining living hostages in exchange for Israel permanently ending the war — something that would likely leave Hamas in power, falling short of Netanyahu’s pledge to fully dismantle the terror group’s military and governing capabilities.

To fulfill that pledge, Trump on Tuesday proposed that the US be the one to replace Hamas in Gaza, offering an alternative that Netanyahu could get behind after the premier repeatedly rejected the Palestinian Authority in that role — the preference of the Biden administration and Arab allies.

But Will It Work?

After the initial uproar and shock of the statements die down, the question is can Trump pull it off? The article goes on to try and address that concern:

Whether Trump’s proposal is viable was another question, as was what it would mean for the 79 remaining hostages in Gaza, whom Hamas has sought to leverage as an insurance policy to remain in power.

Some think that the US president was speaking off the cuff, but these were prepared remarks:

Still reading from his prepared remarks, highlighting that this was not an off-the-cuff idea thrown around during his regular banter with reporters, Trump said he envisioned “long-term [US] ownership” of the Strip.

“We will be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site, [for] get[ting] rid of the destroyed buildings, level[ing] it out, creat[ing] an economy development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing to the people of the area,” Trump said.

He noted that a new approach needs to be taken:

“[We’ve got to] do something different. You just can’t go back. If you go back, it’s going to end up the same way it has been for 100 years,” he said, adding that other leaders in the region backed his idea.

“It should not go through a process of rebuilding and occupation by the same people that have… lived there and died there and lived a miserable existence there,” Trump said of Gaza. He added that he planned to visit the enclave as well as Israel and Saudi Arabia, without saying when.

Talking about his relocation proposal, he linked the two ideas together:

Trump insisted the Palestinians “have no alternative” but to leave the “big pile of rubble” that is Gaza after over 15 months of Israeli bombardments aimed at dismantling Hamas in response to the terror group’s October 7 onslaught.

The US president reiterated his belief that Palestinians should be removed from the “hellhole” of the Strip and placed in one or multiple other countries “with humanitarian hearts.”

President Trump is trying to dismantle the years and years of indoctrination that the land belongs to Palestinians and they can’t live anywhere else. Others in his administration are laying out the logic that the Gazans don’t need to live in the Gaza Strip at all:

Trump’s Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff said Palestinians need not be tied to the land they’re currently on in order to have a better life.

“A better life is not necessarily tied to the physical space that you are in today,” he said in an interview with Fox News shortly after the Trump-Netanyahu press conference.

“A better life is about better opportunity, better financial conditions, better aspirations for you and your family. That doesn’t occur because you get to pitch a tent in the Gaza Strip and you’re surrounded by 30,000 munitions that could go off at any moment,” said Witkoff, who visited Gaza during a trip to the region last week. “Gaza today is uninhabitable and will probably be uninhabitable for at least the next 10 to 15 years.”

Netanyahu Likes What He Hears

Trump obviously brought this up to Netanyahu before they took to the podiums. And If the PM was in disagreement, he certainly didn’t voice it:

Standing at a podium beside Trump, Netanyahu hailed the president as Israel’s “greatest friend” and praised his “willingness to think outside the box.”

“You say things others refuse to say. And after the jaws drop, people scratch their heads and they say, ‘You know he’s right,'” the prime minister said, adding that Trump’s plan could “change history” and was worth “paying attention to.”

I don’t see a total support for the proposals, though, but a willingness to try new things. The two world leaders haven’t always been so chummy, but Netanyahu knows a good thing when he sees it:

The two have had tense relations in the past, but Netanyahu has seized on the Republican’s return to power after his ties with Biden became increasingly frayed over Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza.

“You are the greatest friend Israel has ever had in the White House,” said Netanyahu, listing Trump’s policies toward the Jewish state in his first term, including leaving the Iran nuclear deal, brokering the Abraham Accords, and moving the US embassy to Jerusalem.

“You’ve picked up right where you left off,” he said.

He noted as have others that no deal was forthcoming until Trump won the election and things have only gotten better for Israel:

“Your leadership has brought hostages home,” said Netanyahu. He added that Trump freed up munitions allegedly withheld by the previous administration, ended “unjust sanctions against Israeli citizens” — referring to sanctions on violent settlers — “confronted antisemitism, stopped funding UNRWA, and renewed maximum pressure against Iran.”

All this has been done by Trump in just two weeks, he said. “Can you imagine where we’ll be in four years?”

The PM then took a few victory laps of his own:

Israel, said Netanyahu, has been changing the face of the Middle East since the Hamas onslaught of October 7, 2023.

“We have defeated some of America’s worst enemies. We took out terrorists that were wanted for decades for shedding rivers of American blood,” the premier said.

“Israel has never been stronger and the Iran terror axis has never been weaker,” he said.

Netanyahu still sees a war to end ahead most likely to pave the way for the plans Trump laid out:

But to secure Israel’s future and bring peace to the region, “we have to finish the job,” added Netanyahu, reiterating pledges — which some have criticized as conflicting — to return all the hostages and remove Hamas from power in Gaza.

“Israel will end the war by winning the war,” Netanyahu promised. This, in turn, will “usher in the peace with Saudi Arabia and with others.”

Do all of these plans fit into Bible prophecy? Understand that we only are given what needs to happen for these nations to fulfill God’s plan for Israel and the world and there a great deal of the details that aren’t given to us. As for me, Hamas losing control of Gaza fits. Making the beach front Riviera out of Gaza doesn’t matter. But mark my words, these terrorists are not taking these proposals lying down and will rise up to try and stop them.