Name: Israel’s Apocalyptic Endgame for Gaza
Uploaded: 2026-01-23T17:19:20.000Z
Duration: 48 min 30 s
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On the evening of the 4th of February, America's President Donald Trump stood side by side with Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for one of the most astonishing press conferences in all of American history.

While speaking, Trump announced to the shock of everybody present, that the Gaza Strip's future was going to be neither Palestinian or Israeli.

Instead, Trump declared that the United States would be taking control over the Gaza Strip in a long term ownership position.

Then America would be responsible for dismantling all of the territory's unexploded bombs and other dangerous weapons left over from the past 15 months of war.

Then America would level all of the buildings in Gaza and get rid of all of the destroyed infrastructure and rubble.

And then America would then rebuild the territory into what Trump referred to as the Riviera of the Middle East, a futuristic vision of the territory full of luxury condos and skyrises on prime Mediterranean beachfront property.

As for the 2 million plus Palestinian human beings who currently live within Gaza, Trump suggested during the press conference that they would supposedly be temporarily removed from Gaza and relocated to neighboring Arab countries like Jordan and Egypt, while America oversees Gaza's reconstruction.

Then, once Gaza was fully rebuilt and transformed into something completely different, Trump declared that people from all over the world would come to live in Gaza, including some of the former Palestinian residents.

Now, there's a lot to unpack from this declaration, but

since it was made, Trump and his White House staff have both clarified and contradicted many of the plan's key details.

For one thing, Trump himself has repeatedly asserted since he made the announcement that he is completely serious about it, adding on to Trump's other declared territorial ambitions for America, like Greenland and the Panama Canal.

While Trump initially refused to rule out the idea of using American troops themselves to secure Gaza, that has since been significantly walked back by his press secretary and by himself.

They now insist that no American troops would be used in securing Gaza at all and that no American taxpayer dollars would be used to rebuild the territory either.

On social media, Trump has since insisted that at the conclusion of the fighting in Gaza, whenever that time comes, Israel would have fully resettled all of the millions of Palestinians away from Gaza elsewhere, and

that Israel would then hand over the control and administration of Gaza over to the United States, whereafter the US and international partners, like supposedly the oil and cash rich Arab Gulf states, would work to redevelop Gaza into Trump's vision of the Riviera.

Trump's press secretary, Caroline Levitt, hastily assured reporters at the White House the day after Trump's announcement that any Palestinian displacement away from Gaza was only going to be temporary and would not be permanent.

But then, just a few days later, during an interview on Fox News, Trump contradicted his own press secretary on this issue by stating that the Palestinians would not, in fact, be allowed to return back to Gaza afterwards because they would supposedly have quoted from him directly, much better housing somewhere else and a new permanent place.

Trump's suggested plan for Gaza is the complete ethnic cleansing of more than 2 million Palestinians from their homes.

Trump has insisted that the Palestinians will supposedly want to leave Gaza voluntarily, but

there's no practical way that this is even remotely in the realm of possibility.

The Palestinians of Gaza will never, under any circumstances, just simply agree to what's essentially another nakba for them, repeating their ancestors violent displacement amid the creation of Israel in 1948 that forced many of them into the Gaza Strip to begin with.

Any removal of them from Gaza will require brute force either by Israel or by the United States.

The Geneva Conventions are also clear on the criminality of such a plan if it is actually to be seriously considered and carried out.

They explicitly forbid mass forcible transfers of population from occupied lands, regardless of the motive, while the International Criminal Court explicitly regards forcible population transfers from occupied territory to be a war crime or crimes against humanity.

By every definition of international law, Trump's suggested Gaza plan is a blatant war crime at best, and

it has revoltingly made the ethnic cleansing of millions an official stated policy of his administration.

To only add on to the legal challenges of such a plan, there's also no clear legal mechanism or authority on which the United States could even assume control over the Gaza Strip in the first place.

And that's only the beginning of the plan's problems.

While Netanyahu and Israelis at large have overwhelmingly approved of Trump's plan since it was announced, it has been almost universally rejected and condemned by not just the Palestinians in the Arab and Muslim worlds, but

by pretty much the entire rest of the world beyond America and Israel as well.

The plan, even if it's not real and just something that Trump is using as a bluff for a negotiating tactic, is causing irreparable damage to America's historic Arab allies like Jordan and Egypt, making any potential peace deal and grand alliance between Israel and Saudi Arabia even more difficult than it ever was before.

It's unnecessarily exposing America and Americans in general to increased threats of fundamentalist terrorism it's justifying Hamas and Iran's stated goals of resistance towards Israel and America, and

it's greatly endangering the existence of the fragile ceasefire between Hamas and Israel that was agreed upon in January, and

which the Trump administration itself itself had a direct role in helping to bring about in the first place.

But regardless of how absurd Trump's proposal for Gaza appears, in most respects there is actually some element of truth behind them.

Trump has argued that Gaza is now a hellhole and completely unlivable, and

that that is why the Palestinians of the territory will supposedly want to leave for a supposedly better life in existence somewhere else.

And while he's wrong about the Palestinians wanting to leave, he's right that Gaza itself is currently in an unprecedented level of ruin and destruction.

The sheer scale of the destruction that has been wrought upon Gaza over the past 15 months of total war between Israel and Hamas is difficult for anybody outside of Gaza to truly understand and comprehend.

According to an analysis of Copernicus Sentinel 1 satellite data that was published by Reuters, more than 60% of all the buildings present in Gaza have been destroyed or damaged by the war's fighting, with an even heavier scale of overall damage reported in the previously more densely populated northern areas of the Strip surviving centered around Gaza city.

Up here, 74% of the buildings within Gaza City, which was previously home to more than half a million people, have been damaged or destroyed, while 70% of the buildings in north Gaza have been damaged or destroyed as well.

To get a sense of the overwhelming scale of destruction, a damage assessment by the United Nations Satellite center found that nearly 164,000 buildings in the Gaza Strip were damaged or destroyed by the war.

As of September 2024, almost three times as many buildings as exist on the island of Manhattan in New York City included.

Within those damaged or destroyed buildings, many of which are high rise apartments home to multiple units, are more than 227,000 lost housing units in Gaza, which have left most of the territory's Palestinian population homeless.

A recent study by a nonprofit called Oxfam has concluded that more than 1.6 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are currently homeless in total and living in rudimentary makeshift shelters comprising the vast majority of the territory's pre war population.

It's been further estimated by the United nations that all of these destroyed and damaged buildings in the Gaza Strip have left behind a massive pile of rubble equivalent to about 42 million tons worth of debris, an enormous 14 times more debris than was previously left behind in Gaza by every other war they fought with Israel going all the way back to 2008 just in order to remove all of this rubble from the territory, even under the best case scenarios of constant peace and large amounts of modern construction equipment would take 14 years in order to accomplish, according to a UN report that was published in April of 2024.

And in order to fully remove all of the debris and to completely rebuild Gaza back up into its pre war state would take at least a whopping $80 billion by now.

Also according to the UN, leaving behind this massive bill for anyone to consider who wants to see Gaza rebuilt and assuming the worst case scenario of Gaza remaining under a near total blockade by Israel, the UN estimated that it would take an astonishing 350 years in order to adequately rebuild Gaza back to its pre war levels of economic activity.

Something else that greatly complicates the future of life and any future considerations on how to rebuild Gaza are the unknown but almost certainly massive numbers of unexploded bombs, grenades, artillery shells and other munitions that now litter the gaza strips.

Only 200 days into Israel's bombing campaign of the Gaza Strip In April of 2024, Foreign affairs reported that the Israeli Air Force had already dropped more than 70,000 tons of bombs across the territory, which surpassed the tonnage of bombs dropped at Dresden, Hamburg and London during the Second World War all combined.

Many of these Israeli bombs, just like many of the bombs dropped during the Second World War, failed to explode when they impacted their targets, and

allies scattered around Gaza still live and waiting to be triggered.

Simon Elmont, an explosives expert for a nonprofit called Humanity and Inclusion, recently reported to the Washington Post that there are likely tens of thousands of pieces of unexploded ordinance left behind across the Gaza Strip right now, and

that it would likely take somewhere between 25 and 30 years just to clear most of all of that out.

All of this poses not only a massive hurdle to any reconstruction effort, but

to the continued life and safety of the Palestinians who remain in Gaza too.

Luke Irving, a UN bomb disposal expert who's based in Gaza, also told reporters recently that just since the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas entered into force on 19 January, 24 Palestinians have already succumbed to unexploded ordinance in the territory.

Gaza's most critical infrastructure is overwhelmingly in ruins and littered with these kinds of unexploded bombs.

The territory's hospitals and clinics, its water treatment facilities and its universities, not to mention its mosques and churches, are all overwhelmingly destroyed and reduced to the statistics of rubble that now need to be cleared.

It's also been estimated that the war has destroyed around 70% of Gaza's already limited agricultural land.

And none of this is to even mention the enormous amounts of toxic dust that had been released from the destroyed and damaged buildings in the Strip that are resulting in hazardous chemicals and materials seeping into Gaza's remaining water supply and being breathed into the lungs of Gaza's remaining population.

Most of the buildings in the Gaza Strip are of older construction origin back when asbestos was a more commonly used material before it was well understood to be extremely toxic.

After the war destroyed most of these asbestos laden buildings in the Strip.

The UN has reported that around 800,000 tons of the total debris present in Gaza are likely contaminated with asbestos and will now be required to be handled specially as hazardous waste.

Winds sweeping across Gaza will blow asbestos laden dust across the Strip, while asbestos laden rainfall will spread the toxins even further into Gaza's groundwater and surrounding coastal waters, exposing most if not all of Gaza's remaining surviving population to critical asbestos exposure that will introduce significant long term health effects like lung cancer.

This is all why many analysts argue that the Gaza Strip has already been made uninhabitable by the war between Israel and Hamas, and

why numerous humanitarian organizations and countries from all around the world have already concluded that Israel's war on Gaza has been genocidal in nature.

It's not only the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have been killed during the war, but

the overwhelming destruction dealt to Gaza itself that will make any continued life in existence there for all of the survivors incredibly challenging, if not outright impossible.

This is also why the Trump administration is advocating for removing the Palestinians from Gaza while the territory is rebuilt, because attempting to rebuild the small and crowded territory while there are still around 2 million people living there will inevitably make the process that much more challenging.

But in many ways, the current situation with Gaza in 2025 is similar to that of Tokyo and Japan 80 years ago.

Back in 1945, at the very end of World War II.

Back then, most of Tokyo had been left in ruins by massive allied firebombing attacks on the city During Operation Meeting House, 41 square kilometers of central Tokyo were completely annihilated during those bombings that killed around 100,000 people and left more than a million others homeless, numbers that are fairly comparable to Israel's bombings of Gaza today.

After the war, though, Tokyo managed to be fully rebuilt within only a decade.

By the mid-1950s, while no mass displacement of Tokyo's 1 million homeless residents was carried out through the reconstruction process, either the main differences between Tokyo then compared to Gaza now, however, are twofold.

For one, there was a certainty that the war between Japan and the Allies had ended for good with Imperial Japan's unconditional surrender, which gave confidence to those investing in rebuilding the city that another war wouldn't just immediately destroy them again.

This criteria is currently lacking in Gaza today, where Hamas is still in power and still unwilling to surrender, while the second factor in Tokyo's quick reconstruction was that America's occupation strategy of Japan at the time was to actually assist the local population with rebuilding and returning back to their homes again, a policy that the current Trump administration is currently completely rejecting in Gaza.

To complicate matters even further regarding Gaza's future has been the dramatic hardening in opinions between Jewish Israelis and Palestinians since the October 7, 2023 attack and the war that has followed back in 2012.

Only 13 years ago, the polling agency Gallup found that the majority of the Israeli public supported a two state solution to end the Israel Palestine conflict, with 61% of Israelis at the time reporting that they supported the two state solution and only 30% saying that they rejected it.

Today, the popularity of these opinions have practically switched within mainstream Israeli society.

In October of 2024, one year after the October 7 attacks, another Gallup poll in Israel found that today only 27% of Israelis continue supporting the two state solution as an end to the conflict, While a significant 64% of Israelis now oppose it.

While the differences in opinion between Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs was even more striking, the same October 2024 poll found that only 17% of Israeli Jews now support the creation of an independent Palestinian state, While an overwhelming 75% of Israeli Arabs supported the creation of one, at the same time showing an emerging clear split on this issue between Israel's own Jewish majority and Arab minority population.

Attitudes have also recently shifted sharply against a peaceful solution to the conflict in the occupied Palestinian territories of Gaza and the west bank as well.

Before the current war in Gaza, most research showed that a significant majority of the Palestinians in Gaza supported the two state solution Based on the pre1967 Borders of Palestine being based on Gaza, the West bank and East Jerusalem, While only about 20% of Gazans supported a military solution to ending the conflict that would result in Israel's destruction.

However, a recent study conducted by Foreign affairs in Gaza in January of 2025 concluded that now after the war and the annihilation of Gaza, the Gazan population is almost evenly split between these two opinions, with only 48% still preferring the two state solution and 47% supporting continued warfare resulting in the destruction of Israel.

But even this difference in opinion hides just how much more opposed to the status quo Gazans have become recently.

Because out of that 48% of the population who still support a two state solution, only 20% of them supported the two state solution based on the pre1967 borders, while the other 28% of them advocated for either a return Back to the 1947 UN Partition Plan Borders or Israel granting the Palestinians the right of return enabling all of the descendants of Palestinians who were forced from their homes in the Nakba after 1948 to freely return back to their ancestral homes in Israel again.

And to be fair, despite the majority of Israelis and Palestinians having supported the two state solution back in 2012, the government of Israel, especially under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was consistently making that practically impossible.

The population of Israeli Jewish settlers present in the occupied west bank has roughly quintupled since 1993, from only around 112,000 back then to more than 517,000 today, increasing the Israeli Jewish demographic hold over a territory that has long been considered to be the core of any future independent Palestinian state and making it significantly harder for Israel to simply give it up, since doing so now would require the evacuations of more than half a million Jewish settlers there back into Israel proper.

The west bank is, of course, of enormous geostrategic importance to Israel, so much so that it will almost certainly never give it all up voluntarily.

This is because the west bank forms a highly elevated mountain ridge that runs north to south that directly overlooks the densely populated Israeli coastal plain that's home to tel Aviv and 70% of the entire Israeli population, including all of the country's most valuable tech companies and industry and the major international airport.

The distance from the west bank to downtown Tel Aviv is only about 16 km at its narrowest point, meaning that if any hostile power was in control of the west bank, they could utilize the high ground to bombard Israel's narrow core on the coastal plain.

And they could easily advance at the narrowest point to sever Israel into two separate halves.

Control over the west bank is, geographically speaking, crucial for anybody who wants to either defend or to harm Israel.

And So ever since 1967, Israel has calculated that the damage done to their international reputation by continuing to occupy the west bank is better than giving up their control over it to an uncertain future.

And those attitudes have only hardened within Israel's Jewish population.

Following Hamas October 7th attack from the Israeli perspective.

Now, if Hamas was able to do as much damage to Israel as it did from Gaza, a hostile force in control of the West bank merely 16km away from Israel's biggest city would be capable of causing even more damage.