Trump Plan Seeks To Resettle Up To A Million Palestinians From War-Ravaged Gaza To War-Torn Libya

US officials who spoke to NBC News say that the Trump administration is looking to “permanently relocate” as many as one million Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to Libya.

Washington in return “would potentially release to Libya billions of dollars” that have been frozen since the NATO intervention of 2011, according to the claims of the anonymous sources.

“The plan is under serious enough consideration that the administration has discussed it with Libya’s leadership, two people with direct knowledge of the plans and a former US official said,” NBC writes in the fresh report.

“No final agreement has been reached, and Israel has been kept informed of the administration’s discussions,” it adds.

And yet this would see Palestinians go from war-ravaged and destroyed Gaza to being in a situation of another failed state, given Libya has experienced its own turmoil for well over a decade. 

NATO’s 2011 military intervention which led to the overthrow and summary street execution of longtime leader Muammar Gaddafi resulted in anything but democracy and stability.

For a time, the country had at least three rival governments and power centers, and currently remains divided into an eastern half and western half. This past week has even seen rival warlords engaged in street gun battles in the capital of Libya, where a UN-backed government holds tenuous control.

NBC says that this ‘Libya option’ – which would be premised on the forced displacement of Palestinians would include offering “financial incentives such as free housing and even a stipend.” Ironically, Gaddafi’s Libya before the US-NATO bombings was a relatively secular place with plenty of state subsidized housing and benefits. 

But since the NATO war, orchestrated under then President Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, radical Islamic militant groups, and even a local ISIS affiliate, have caused chaos in many areas, which on some occasions have also brought oil exports to a halt.

Likely most Palestinians themselves would not want to relocate to North Africa, and the long destabilized political situation there of competing warlords would make this ‘offer’ even less appealing.

Post NATO-intervention Libya has remained in an internecine state of civil war:

a Libyan who bought into US-NATO-Israeli-Saudi-UAE propaganda and took up arms against Ghaddafi thinking he was actually fighting for freedom, democracy and “true Islam”, reflects on what he did after his fall: “If Ghaddafi were alive now, I would fight for him.” Syria soon. pic.twitter.com/zgNhRaesf3

— (@zei_squirrel) December 7, 2024

Soon after entering his second term in office, President Trump began calling for regional Arab nations to take in Palestinians, such as Egypt and Jordan, despite the fact that they already have absorbed millions going back into the 20th century.

For example, in late January Trump described a call with Jordan’s King Abdullah II as follows:

“I’d like Egypt to take people,” Trump said at the time.

“You’re talking about probably a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing and say, ‘You know, it’s over.’”

But Gaza is one historic issue, which also of course dovetails with religion and ancient grievances, that isn’t going to be solved by just handing out cash or free housing.

No simple American taxpayer funded quid pro quo can solve the Gaza crisis, recent history has demonstrated, also as the Israeli military and political leadership isn’t in the mood for swift deal-making.