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Standing beside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump said that "the U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip," which would be emptied of Palestinians.
U.S. President Donald Trump said Tuesday that the United States will "take over" Gaza after emptying the embattled enclave of nearly all its native Palestinians, sparking a firestorm of criticism that included allegations of intent to commit ethnic cleansing.
Speaking during a press conference with fugitive Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday, Trump told reporters, "The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it too."
"We'll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site, level the site, and get rid of the destroyed buildings—level it out and create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area," Trump continued.
"We're going to develop it, create thousands and thousands of jobs, and it will be something that the entire Middle East could be very proud of," he said, evoking the proposals of varying seriousness to build Jewish-only beachfront communities over the ruins of Gaza.
Doubling down on his January call for the removal of most of Gaza's population to Egypt and Jordan—both of which vehemently rejected the proposal—Trump said that "it would be my hope that we could do something really nice, really good, where [Palestinians] wouldn't want to return."
"Why would they want to return?" asked Trump. "The place has been hell."
Asked how many Palestinians should leave Gaza, Trump replied, "all of them," citing a figure of 1.7-1.8 million Palestinians out of an estimated population of approximately 2.3 million people.
The forced transfer of a population by an occupying power is a war crime, according to Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention—under which Israel's settler colonies in the occupied West Bank are also illegal.
"I don't think people should be going back to Gaza," Trump continued. "Gaza is not a place for people to be living, and the only reason they want to go back, and I believe this strongly, is because they have no alternative. If they had an alternative, they'd much rather not go back to Gaza and live in a beautiful alternative that's safe."
Asked if he would deploy U.S. troops to Gaza, Trump said that "we'll do what's necessary. If it's necessary, we'll do that."
Palestinian Ambassador to the U.N. Riyad Mansour responded by affirming that "our country and our home is the Gaza Strip."
"It's part of Palestine," he stressed. "Our homeland is our homeland."
Responding to Trump's remarks, Netanyahu praised his ally's "willingness to puncture conventional thinking" and stand behind Israel.
"[Trump] sees a different future for that piece of land that has been the focus of so much terrorism, so many attacks against us, so many trials and so many tribulations," Netanyahu told reporters as he stood beside the U.S. leader. "He has a different idea, and I think it's worth paying attention to this. We're talking about it. He's exploring it with his people, with his staff."
"I think it's something that could change history," Netanyahu added, "and it's worthwhile really pursuing this avenue."
There is currently a fragile cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, where more than 15 months of Israeli bombardment, invasion, and siege have left more than 170,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing and more than 2 million others forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened, according to local and international officials and agencies.
Numerous Israeli leaders have advocated the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza and the Jewish recolonization of the coastal enclave, most of whose inhabitants are the descendants of Palestinians forcibly expelled from other parts of Palestine during the establishment of the modern state of Israel in the late 1940s. Palestinians ethnically cleansed during what they call the Nakba, or catastrophe, have since been denied their U.N.-guaranteed right of return to their homeland.
Last November, former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon acknowledged that the ethnic cleansing of northern Gaza was underway. Other Israeli political and military leaders have said that the so-called "Generals' Plan"—a strategy to starve and ethnically cleanse Palestinians from northern Gaza—was effectively in progress.
Palestinian-American journalist Ramzy Baroud responded to Trump's remarks in a video posted on social media Tuesday.
"Now, you would say, 'Wait a minute, Trump seems to be really, really determined, his heart is set on ethnically cleansing Palestinians, and this subject is back on the table,'" Baroud said. "The question is, whose table? It's not on the table of the Palestinian people."
Earlier Tuesday, Trump signed an executive order withdrawing the United States from the U.N. Human Rights Council (UNHRC) and continuing the freeze on funding for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which Israel has baselessly
accused of being a terrorist organization.
In a fact sheet viewed by multiple media outlets, the White House asserted that UNHRC "has not fulfilled its purpose and continues to be used as a protective body for countries committing horrific human rights violations."
"The UNHRC has demonstrated consistent bias against Israel, focusing on it unfairly and disproportionately in council proceedings," the White House continued. "In 2018, the year President Trump withdrew from the UNHRC in his first administration, the organization passed more resolutions condemning Israel than Syria, Iran, and North Korea combined."
UNHRC spokesperson Pascal Sim noted Tuesday that the U.S. has been an observer state, not a UNHRC member, since January 1, and according to U.N. rules, it cannot "technically withdraw from an intergovernmental body that is no longer part of."
The UNRWA funding pause is based on Israeli claims—reportedly extracted from Palestinian prisoners in an interrogation regime rife with torture and abuse—that a dozen of the agency's more than 13,000 workers in Gaza were involved in the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack. These claims prompted numerous nations including the United States to cut off funding for UNRWA last year. The U.S. had been UNRWA's biggest benefactor, providing $300-400 million annually to the lifesaving organization.
UNRWA fired nine employees in response to Israel's claim, even as the agency admitted there was no evidence linking the staffers to October 7. Faced with this lack of evidence, the European Union and countries including Japan, Germany, Canada, and Australia reinstated funding for UNRWA. Last March, then-U.S. President Joe Biden signed a bill prohibiting American funding for the agency.
Israeli lawmakers have also
banned UNRWA from operating in Israel, severely hampering the agency's ability to carry out its mission throughout Palestine, including in Gaza and the illegally occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.
According to the most recent UNRWA situation report, at least 272 of the agency's workers have been killed by Israeli forces, which since October 2023 have bombed numerous schools, shelters, and other facilities used by the agency.
William Deere, the director of UNRWA's Washington, D.C. office, toldPBS earlier this week that "there is no alternative to UNRWA."
"UNRWA performs a unique function in the U.N. system," Deere explained. "We are a direct service provider. We run... a healthcare network, we run an education system, we provide relief and social services."
As U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said last month, "UNRWA has been carrying out activities in the occupied Palestinian territory for more than 70 years... and has thus accumulated unparalleled experience in providing assistance that is tailored to the specific needs of Palestine refugees."
Trump's executive order preceded his meeting with Netanyahu, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court after it issued arrest warrants for him and Yoav Gallant, his former defense minister, last November for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. The tribunal also issued a warrant for Hamas leader Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri.
The U.S. president's directives also followed his January freeze on foreign aid to countries except for Israel and Egypt, and his plan to shut down the United States Agency for International Development.
I kept calling her, over and over again, hoping that the line would crackle a bit, followed by a brief silence, and then her kind, motherly voice would say, “Marhaba Abu Sammy. How are you, brother?” But she never picked up.
“Your lives will continue. With new events and new faces. They are the faces of your children, who will fill your homes with noise and laughter.”
These were the last words written by my sister in a text message to one of her daughters.
Dr. Soma Baroud was murdered on October 9 when Israeli warplanes bombed a taxi that carried her and other tired Gazans somewhere near the Bani Suhaila roundabout near Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip.
I am still unable to understand whether she was on her way to the hospital, where she worked, or leaving the hospital to go home. Does it even matter?
The news of her murder—or, more accurately assassination, as Israel has deliberately targeted and killed 986 medical workers, including 165 doctors—arrived through a screenshot copied from a Facebook page.
“Update: these are the names of the martyrs of the latest Israeli bombing of two taxis in the Khan Yunis area ..,” the post read.
It was followed by a list of names. “Soma Mohammed Mohammed Baroud” was the fifth name on the list, and the 42,010th on Gaza’s ever-growing list of martyrs.
I refused to believe the news, even when more posts began popping up everywhere on social media, listing her as number five, and sometimes six in the list of martyrs of the Khan Yunis strike.
For us, Soma was a larger-than-life figure. This is precisely why her sudden absence has shocked us to the point of disbelief. Her children, though grown up, felt orphaned. But her brothers, me included, felt the same way.
I kept calling her, over and over again, hoping that the line would crackle a bit, followed by a brief silence, and then her kind, motherly voice would say, “Marhaba Abu Sammy. How are you, brother?” But she never picked up.
I had told her repeatedly that she does not need to bother with elaborate text or audio messages due to the unreliable internet connection and electricity. “Every morning,” I said, “just type: ‘we are fine’.” That’s all I asked of her.
But she would skip several days without writing, often due to the lack of an internet connection. Then, a message would arrive, though never brief. She wrote with a torrent of thoughts, linking up her daily struggle to survive, to her fears for her children, to poetry, to a Qur’anic verse, to one of her favorite novels, and so on.
“You know, what you said last time reminds me of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude,” she said on more than one occasion, before she would take the conversation into the most complex philosophical spins. I would listen, and just repeat, “Yes .. totally .. I agree .. one hundred percent.”
For us, Soma was a larger-than-life figure. This is precisely why her sudden absence has shocked us to the point of disbelief. Her children, though grown up, felt orphaned. But her brothers, me included, felt the same way.
I wrote about Soma as a central character in my book “My Father Was a Freedom Fighter”, because she was indeed central to our lives, and to our very survival in a Gaza refugee camp.
The first born, and only daughter, she had to carry a much greater share of work and expectations than the rest of us.
She was just a child, when my eldest brother Anwar, still a toddler, died in an UNRWA clinic at the Nuseirat refugee camp due to the lack of medicine. Then, she was introduced to pain, the kind of pain that with time turned into a permanent state of grief that would never abandon her until her murder by a U.S.-supplied Israeli bomb in Khan Yunis.
Two years after the death of the first Anwar, another boy was born. They also called him Anwar, so that the legacy of the first boy may carry on. Soma cherished the newcomer, maintaining a special friendship with him for decades to come.
My father began his life as a child laborer, then a fighter in the Palestine Liberation Army, then a police officer during the Egyptian administration of Gaza, then, once again a laborer; that’s because he refused to join the Israeli-funded Gaza police force after the war of 1967, known as the Naksa.
A clever, principled man, and a self-taught intellectual, my Dad did everything he could to provide a measure of dignity for his small family; and Soma, a child, often barefoot, stood by him every step of the way.
She did not charge the poor and did all she could to heal those victimized by war.
When he decided to become a merchant, as in buying discarded and odd items in Israel and repackaging them to sell in the refugee camp, Soma was his main helper. Though her skin healed, cuts on her fingers, due to individually wrapping thousands of razors, remained a testament to the difficult life she lived.
“Soma’s little finger is worth more than a thousand men,” my father would often repeat, to remind us, ultimately five boys, that our sister will always be the main heroine in the family’s story. Now that she is a martyr, that legacy has been secured for eternity.
Years later, my parents would send her to Aleppo to obtain a medical degree. She returned to Gaza, where she spent over three decades healing the pain of others, though never her own.
She worked at Al-Shifa Hospital, at Nasser Hospital among other medical centers. Later, she obtained another certificate in family medicine, opening a clinic of her own. She did not charge the poor and did all she could to heal those victimized by war.
Soma was a member of a generation of female doctors in Gaza that truly changed the face of medicine, collectively putting great emphasis on the rights of women to medical care and expanding the understanding of family medicine to include psychological trauma with particular emphasis on the centrality, but also the vulnerability of women in a war-torn society.
When my daughter Zarefah managed to visit her in Gaza shortly before the war, she told me that “when Aunt Soma walked into the hospital, an entourage of women—doctors, nurses, and other medical staff—would surround her in total adoration.”
At one point, it felt that all of Soma’s suffering was finally paying off: a nice family home in Khan Yunis, with a small olive orchard, and a few palm trees; a loving husband, himself a professor of law, and eventually the dean of law school at a reputable Gaza university; three daughters and two sons, whose educational specialties ranged from dentistry to pharmacy, to law to engineering.
Life, even under siege, at least for Soma and her family, seemed manageable. True, she was not allowed to leave the Strip for many years due to the blockade, and thus we were denied the chance to see her for years on end. True, she was tormented by loneliness and seclusion, thus her love affair and constant citation from García Márquez’s seminal novel. But at least her husband was not killed or went missing. Her beautiful house and clinic were still standing. And she was living and breathing, communicating her philosophical nuggets about life, death, memories and hope.
“If I could only find the remains of Hamdi, so that we can give him a proper burial,” she wrote to me last January, when the news circulated that her husband was executed by an Israeli quadcopter in Khan Yunis.
But since the body remained missing, she held on to some faint hope that he was still alive. Her boys, on the other hand, kept digging in the wreckage and debris of the area where Hamdi was shot, hoping to find him and to give him a proper burial. They would often be attacked by Israeli drones in the process of trying to unearth their father’s body. They would run away, and return with their shovels to carry on with the grim task.
To maximize their chances of survival, my sister’s family decided to split up between displacement camps and other family homes in southern Gaza.
This meant that Soma had to be in a constant state of moving, traveling, often long distances on foot, between towns, villages and refugee camps, just to check on her children, following every incursion, and every massacre.
“I am exhausted,” she kept telling me. “All I want from life is for this war to end, for new cozy pajamas, my favorite book, and a comfortable bed.”
These simple and reasonable expectations looked like a mirage, especially when her home in the Qarara area, in Khan Yunis, was demolished by the Israeli army last month.
“I am exhausted. All I want from life is for this war to end, for new cozy pajamas, my favorite book, and a comfortable bed.”
“My heart aches. Everything is gone. Three decades of life, of memories, of achievement, all turned into rubble,” she wrote.
“This is not a story about stones and concrete. It is much bigger. It is a story that cannot be fully told, however long I wrote or spoke. Seven souls had lived here. We ate, drank, laughed, quarreled, and despite all the challenges of living in Gaza, we managed to carve out a happy life for our family,” she continued.
A few days before she was killed, she told me that she had been sleeping in a half-destroyed building belonging to her neighbors in Qarara. She sent me a photo taken by her son, as she sat on a makeshift chair, on which she also slept amidst the ruins. She looked tired, so very tired.
There was nothing I could say or do to convince her to leave. She insisted that she wanted to keep an eye on the rubble of what remained of her home. Her logic made no sense to me. I pleaded with her to leave. She ignored me, and instead kept sending me photos of what she had salvaged from the rubble, an old photo, a small olive tree, a birth certificate.
My last message to her, hours before she was killed, was a promise that when the war is over, I will do everything in my power to compensate her for all of this. That the whole family would meet in Egypt, or Türkiye, and that we will shower her with gifts, and boundless family love. I finished with, “let’s start planning now. Whatever you want. You just say it. Awaiting your instructions…” She never saw the message.
Even when her name, as yet another casualty of the Israeli genocide in Gaza was mentioned in local Palestinian news, I refused to believe it. I continued to call. “Please pick up, Soma, please pick up,” I pleaded with her.
I refuse to see her but in the way that she wanted to be seen, a strong person, a manifestation of love, kindness and wisdom, whose “little finger is worth more than a thousand men.”
Only when a video emerged of white body bags arriving at Nasser Hospital in the back of an ambulance, I thought maybe my sister was indeed gone.
Some of the bags had the names of the others mentioned in the social media posts. Each bag was pulled out separately and placed on the ground. A group of mourners, bereaved men, women and children would rush to hug the body, screaming the same shouts of agony and despair that accompanied this ongoing genocide from the first day.
Then, another bag, with the name ‘Soma Mohammed Mohammed Baroud’ written across the thick white plastic. Her colleagues carried her body and gently laid it on the ground. They were about to zip the bag open to verify her identity. I looked the other way.
I refuse to see her but in the way that she wanted to be seen, a strong person, a manifestation of love, kindness and wisdom, whose “little finger is worth more than a thousand men.”
But why do I continue to check my messages with the hope that she will text me to tell me that the whole thing was a major, cruel misunderstanding and that she is okay?
My sister Soma was buried under a small mound of dirt, somewhere in Khan Yunis.
No more messages from her.