US President Donald Trump’s view of a Gaza Strip without its Palestinian inhabitants and turned into an international beach resort under US control revived an idea launched by its son -in -law Jared Kushner a year ago.
The idea, at a press conference on Tuesday (4), caused both Palestinians and, who claim that this would be equivalent to ethnic cleaning and would be illegal according to international law.
But this was not the first time Trump spoke of Gaza in terms of real estate investment opportunities. In October last year, he told a radio interviewer that Gaza could be “better than Monaco” if it was rebuilt correctly.
The idea of a radical Gaza reconstruction was ventilated shortly after Israel began his campaign in the coastal edge after the attack led by Hamas to Israel on October 7, 2023, mainly by Kushner, who, as a special sent to the Middle East on Trump’s first term helped lead the “Abraham’s agreements”, normalizing the relationship between Israel and various Arab countries.
“A real estate on the seaside of Gaza could be very valuable,” said Kushner, who once described the entire Arab-Israeli conflict as “nothing more than a real estate dispute between Israeli and Palestinians” at an Harvard event in February 2024.
“It’s a little unhappy situation, but I think, from Israel’s point of view, I would do my best to get people out there,” he said. Kushner himself was a real estate prosecutor in New York before Trump’s first term.
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A Kushner spokesman did not immediately respond to a commentary request for this story.
There were also doubts about how Trump’s proposal should be understood, given his negotiator reputation, used to disturbing his negotiating partners with attacks from unexpected angles.
Saudi Arabia, the predominant power in the Arab world, “will not take this statement very seriously,” said a source close to the royal court in Riyadh. “She was not well thought out and is impossible to implement, so he will eventually realize that.”
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In a statement on Wednesday, the Saudi Arabia Foreign Ministry said the kingdom rejected any attempt to move the Palestinians from their lands. Both the Palestinian authority and Hamas also condemned the comments.
Reuters failed to determine whether Kushner, whose private equity company received investments from Gulf countries, including $ 2 billion from Saudi Arabia, was involved in some discussion in the region about investment in Gaza.
For Palestinians, as unlikely as it may seem like Gaza’s idea as a resort by the sea, this type of conversation resembles Nakba or catastrophe after the 1948 war at the beginning of the state of Israel, when 700,000 people fled or were forced to leave their homes.
