President Trump has described his proposal to seize control of Gaza and displace the Palestinian population as a humanitarian imperative, a gesture that would allow people living in what he called a “hellhole” to finally find peace somewhere else.
But beneath his astonishing plan were echoes of forced displacement that have shaped Palestinian society since 1948. The establishment of Israel that year in the Arab-Israeli war is known to Palestinians as the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” because of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their homes.
“It’s ethnic cleansing,” said Omer Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University who has been critical of Israel’s conduct in the war in Gaza. Mr. Trump’s statement, he said, was “camouflaged as this humanitarian act.”
After an immediate backlash, top Trump administration officials tried to soften elements of the plan on Wednesday. They insisted that any relocation of Palestinians would be temporary and that Mr. Trump had not committed to putting U.S. troops on the ground. Mr. Trump said Tuesday that he envisioned “long-term ownership” of Gaza and that he would send troops “if necessary.”
“The president made this decision with a humanitarian heart,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told reporters as she stood alongside images of destruction in Gaza.
Mr. Trump had said that “everybody I’ve spoken to loves the idea of the United States owning that piece of land, developing and creating thousands of jobs.”
“All they see,” he added, “is death and destruction and rubble and demolished buildings falling all over.”
Still, the declaration of intent for the mass relocation of Palestinians amplified calls by members of Israel’s far-right cabinet to get Palestinians to leave Gaza. Itamar Ben-Gvir, until recently the country’s hard-line national security minister, said Mr. Trump’s plan to move Gazans en masse echoed his own idea of “encouraging” Palestinians to emigrate.
Forced deportation or transfer of a civilian population is a war crime and a crime against humanity.
Despite Mr. Trump’s argument that Palestinians would welcome the chance to live in another place, Palestinians provided a reminder of their commitment to rebuilding their homes after the most recent cease-fire was reached.
Thousands set out on foot back to northern Gaza, picking their way through mounds of rubble and debris. For months, they had heard Israeli calls to settle the north of Gaza with Israeli civilians. Instead, they would return to their homes, or whatever was left of them.
Riyad Mansour, the leader of the Palestinian delegation to the United Nations, insisted there was no way Palestinians or neighboring Arab states would accept Mr. Trump’s proposals.
“Our homeland is our homeland if part of it is destroyed,” he wrote on social media.
Israel’s military offensive in Gaza, launched after Hamas terrorists killed more than 1,200 people in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, leveled entire swaths of the enclave and forced some 90 percent of the population from their homes. Israel’s military operation has killed more than 47,000 people, according to Gazan health officials, whose count does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Many Gazans were displaced not once, but several times, as each area they fled to then came under bombardment.
U.S. lawmakers and others expressed outrage over Mr. Trump’s idea.
“Palestinians aren’t going anywhere,” said Rashida Tlaib, Democrat of Michigan and the lone Palestinian American in Congress.
“Trump’s proposal to push two million Palestinians out of Gaza and take ‘ownership’ by force, if necessary, is simply ethnic cleansing by another name,” Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, said in a statement on Tuesday. On Wednesday, António Guterres, the United Nations secretary general, warned against “any form of ethnic cleansing” in Gaza.
Unlike genocide, ethnic cleansing is not recognized as a specific crime under international law.
A United Nations commission of experts tasked with assessing violations of humanitarian laws committed in the territory of the former Yugoslavia defined ethnic cleansing “as a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas.”