US President Donald Trump said on Wednesday he would support efforts to permanently resettle Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to places where they can live without fear of violence, Reuters reported, quoted by BTA.
Welcoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House, the first foreign leader to visit Trump since he took office last month, the US president said he and his team had discussed the possibility of resettling Palestinians with countries like Jordan, Egypt and other countries in the region.
The US president said he would like to see an agreement to "resettle people permanently in nice homes where they can be happy and not be shot, not be killed".
Trump also said the US would "take control of the war-torn Gaza Strip" after Palestinians are relocated elsewhere and develop it economically, a move that would reverse decades of Washington's policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The US president unveiled his surprise plan without giving details at a joint news conference after meeting with visiting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday. The statement follows Trump's shock proposal earlier on Wednesday to permanently relocate Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to neighboring countries, calling the enclave, where the first phase of a fragile truce between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist movement "Hamas" is now in effect, a - "a devastated place".
"The United States will take control of the Gaza Strip and we will also achieve something," Trump told reporters. "We will manage it and be responsible for the destruction of all the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons in the area," the US president added.
"If necessary - and we will, we will take control of this piece (of land - ed. note) and develop it, create thousands and thousands of jobs and it will be something that the entire Middle East can be very proud of," Trump added.
When asked who would live there, Trump said it could become home to "people of the world" and predicted that it could become "the most popular Riviera in the Middle East".
Netanyahu, whose military forces have been engaged in fierce fighting with "Hamas" militants in the Gaza Strip for more than a year, said in response that his host "thinks outside the box and has fresh ideas", demonstrating "a willingness to break through conventional thinking".
Trump did not directly answer the question of how and under what authority the United States could seize land in the Gaza Strip and establish control over it in the long term, Reuters notes.
The US president also said that he planned to visit the Gaza Strip, Israel and Saudi Arabia during a future trip to the Middle East. Trump did not specify when he planned to make such a trip, but said that people from all over the world would live in the Gaza Strip after its reconstruction.