Donald Trump‘s plan to forcibly displace Gazans so the United States can “own” the Gaza strip amounts to “ethnic cleansing” and is against international law, a United Nations expert said.
The president on Tuesday announced, in a press conference alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip. We’ll do a job with it, too. We’ll own it.” Trump has said that he wants to transform Gaza into “the Riviera of the Middle East.”
“Basically the United States would view it as a real estate transaction where we’ll be an investor in that part of the world,” Trump said Friday. In order to accomplish this, Trump has proposed moving nearly 2 million Palestinians out of Gaza into nearby countries such as Jordan and Egypt, saying he wants to “clean out that whole thing.”
But Navi Pillay, chair of the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, says this plan “amounts to ethnic cleansing.”
“Trump is woefully ignorant of international law and the law of occupation. Forcible displacement of an occupied group is an international crime, and amounts to ethnic cleansing,” Pillay told Politico in an interview. Pillay is a longtime UN investigator who more than a decade ago called for the closure of Guantanamo Bay.
“There is no way under the law that Trump could carry out the threat to dislocate Palestinians from their land,” Pillay added.
Human Rights Watch also criticized Trump’s proposal as ethnic cleansing and against international law. “Standing beside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose government was responsible for this policy and is wanted for atrocity crimes by the International Criminal Court, President Donald Trump suggested displacing Palestinians on an even larger scale and ‘taking over’ Gaza as potential U.S. policy in light of the destruction in Gaza,” said Lama Fakih, Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “It would move the U.S. from being complicit in war crimes to direct perpetration of atrocities.” Editor’s picks The 100 Best TV Episodes of All Time The 250 Greatest Albums of the 21st Century So Far The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time The 200 Greatest Singers of All Time
Netanyahu — who has led a more than year long military assault on Gaza following Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel — said it was “worth listening carefully to” Trump’s proposal.
“International law applies equally, without double standards for a state’s friends,” Pillay said.
This past October, Pillay and a team of UN Human Rights Council-appointed experts released a report that concluded Israel has committed war crimes and attempted to shatter Gaza’s healthcare system while intentionally targeting medical personnel and facilities, including torturing healthcare workers. “Children in particular have borne the brunt of these attacks, suffering both directly and indirectly from the collapse of the health system,” Pillay said at the time.
Since taking office, Trump has lifted restrictions put in place by the Biden administration that had halted the sale of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel. Biden stopped the sales because the high payload munitions were being used in densely populated areas of the strip.
Trump just this weekend defied Congress by pushing forward an $8 billion weapons sale to Israel. Biden had announced the sale early last month, but it had not gone through yet because it was under congressional review by the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Trump now appears to be circumventing congressional approval. In order to stop the sale, Congress would need a two-thirds vote in both the House and Senate. With Republicans controlling both houses, that is highly unlikely.
Israel and Hamas are currently engaged in a ceasefire. Israel’s recent attacks on Gaza have killed more than 46,600 Palestinians, with one study estimating 64,260 Palestinians died from traumatic injuries between Oct. 2023 and June 2024.
Pillay said that she would “support” the International Criminal Court if it charged Israel with apartheid. “Apartheid is one of the manifestations of control there,” she said in reference to Israel’s occupation of Palestine.
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