Trump administration officials say the five-year timeline laid out in later phases of a peace deal between Israel and Hamas is too short, estimating the timeline will be at least twice that.
While officials were cautious about explicitly backing Trump’s suggestion to “clean out” Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and house them elsewhere during reconstruction, they suggested the territory may be uninhabitable in the interim and called for “creative” regional solutions.
“Phase three, the reconstruction, is not going to go the way that agreement talks about, which is a five-year program,” Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy for the Middle East told reporters, referring to the three-phase ceasefire deal negotiated by the Biden administration.
Trump’s team says reconstruction is likely to take between 10 and 15 years.
A senior administration official said Trump “looks at the Gaza Strip and sees it as a demolition site” and “sees it as impractical for it to be rebuilt within three to five years, believes it will take at least 10 to 15 and thinks it’s inhumane to force people to live in an uninhabitable plot of land with unexploded ordnance and rubble.”
The remarks come ahead of a meeting between Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House on Tuesday.
Trump said last week that he would like both Jordan and Egypt, which borders Gaza, to help house people at least temporarily outside of the war-torn strip.
“You’re talking about a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One.
“Almost everything’s demolished, and people are dying there, so I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing in a different location where I think they could maybe live in peace for a change.”
Arab leaders in the region have said efforts to displace Palestinians or move them into neighboring countries are a non-starter. Egypt and Jordan, countries with peace treaties with Israel, oppose absorbing Palestinians claiming it poses a security risk, is destabilizing, and threatens to provoke mass opposition on the Arab street.
Five Arab foreign ministers and a senior Palestinian official sent a joint letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio opposing plans to displace Palestinians from Gaza, Axios reported.
But Trump’s team said they are trying to be transparent over the scale of reconstruction, and the need to share the burden.
“I would push back on that characterization of ‘cleaning out Gaza,'” Mike Waltz, Trump’s national security advisor, told reporters Tuesday.
“Trump is looking at this from a humanitarian standpoint. There are piles of rubble, we have to realistically look at how to rebuild Gaza. We are talking 10-15 years to rebuild. We have to work through and that’s what we’ll work through with Prime Minister Netanyahu,” Waltz added.
The ceasefire deal is made up of three phases. Israel and Hamas are currently adhering to the first phase of the deal.
A senior administration official said that the White House message, during a meeting with Arab ambassadors in Washington, was to try and find creative solutions that “would be humane and will provide dignity for the Palestinian people.”
“I was there speaking with them, and what we’ve asked for is to work together with our Arab partners and friends in the region and with Israel, to all come together for creative solutions to this challenge,” the official said.
“This is not going to be something that the United States is going to solve alone and that we’re going to impose on Arab [nations] and Israel, but rather, we’re asking our friends and partners and allies to come together as we look for what solutions we can provide that would be humane and will provide dignity for the Palestinian people.”
