‘Pandemonium’: Palestinian Americans React to Trump’s Gaza Takeover Plan

Palestinians in the United States could not believe what they were hearing.

As President Trump proposed an American “takeover” of the Gaza Strip and the removal of its Palestinian population on Tuesday night, a sense of bemused horror took hold in living rooms, dorm lounges and the group chats of Palestinian families across the country.

“Honestly, it was pandemonium,” said Thaer Ahmed, 38, a physician outside Chicago. “Everyone was texting each other. There were mixed emotions — some people thought it was hilarious, some people were furious. But nobody saw this coming.”

Mr. Trump made his proposal during a White House news conference as he stood beside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who is the subject of an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court for war crimes in the Gaza Strip.

The plan was met with immediate opposition from world leaders, who called it a breach of international law and a threat to regional stability in the Middle East. On Wednesday, the administration tried to walk back elements of the proposal, saying that Mr. Trump had not committed to sending U.S. troops to Gaza and that any relocation of Palestinians would be temporary.

In interviews, many Palestinian Americans said the idea of expelling millions of people from the Gaza Strip and placing it under American control was horrifying and absurd, and also unsurprising, given the broader context of Middle Eastern history.

“There’s a long list of adjectives we could run through,” said Yousef Munayyer, the head of the Palestine-Israel Program at the Arab Center Washington D.C., a think tank, when asked for his thoughts on the proposal. “Outrageous, criminal, harebrained. How much time do you have?”

But he noted that the idea of forcing Palestinians from their homes was in no way new.

“The region has suffered for decades from instability and conflict precisely because of the mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians during the creation of Israel in 1948,” said Mr. Munayyer, referring to the expulsion and flight of some 750,000 Palestinians from the land. “That’s not lost on anyone there in the region.”

Just over two weeks ago, Mr. Trump and President Joseph R. Biden Jr. were celebrating a long-sought cease-fire deal between Hamas and Israel that was negotiated by advisers to both administrations in the closing days of Mr. Biden’s term.

But on Wednesday, all of that seemed very far away. Many Palestinians in the United States said they felt a deep sense of foreboding about the effect Mr. Trump’s comments could have on the fragile peace deal, under which Hamas has released Israeli hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. Negotiations over the cease-fire’s second phase only began earlier in the day on Tuesday.

And those interviewed said they were shocked by the ways that Mr. Trump’s proposal seemed to rewrite the recent history of the war in Gaza, which began in 2023 after Hamas and other groups killed roughly 1,200 people and took 250 hostages during a surprise attack on Israel.

In the war that followed, Israel displaced almost two million people, destroyed Gaza’s civilian infrastructure and killed more than 47,000 people, according to local health officials, whose count does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.

Zahra Sakkejha, 35, a Palestinian Canadian health care worker who lives in Los Angeles, said that it was impossible to overstate how painful it was to hear people in power keep saying that the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis was simply to remove the Palestinians.

“It just hits the core wound of every Palestinian about the Nakba,” she said, referring to the events of 1948. “We can never be recognized for just wanting to live our life where we are from.”

Her family is from Jaffa, which is now a neighborhood of Tel Aviv. She does peace-building work with Israeli allies through an organization called Standing Together, but said that proposals like Mr. Trump’s made that task harder.

“We’re human beings, we have lives, we have the same hopes and dreams as anyone else,” she said. “So that’s part of the frustration, is that anytime that there’s mention of us as a people, it’s always in the context of either we’re terrorists or we’re a problem. We are like cattle they have to move around.”

Noreen Rashid, 22, of Rockaway, N.J., said she had long feared that the United States or Israel might take over Gaza. The proposal has made her reflect sadly on her last visit to see her relatives there, just one month before the war began.

“I saw the last of it, and the best of it,” she said. “Now I’m thinking about when I have children, and it’s an out-of-body experience to know they will never know Gaza — that it’s all going to be Trump villas.”

Laila Elhaddad, an activist and author who spent part of her childhood in Gaza and now lives in Maryland, said that watching Mr. Trump describe the removal of Palestinians from the “hellhole” of Gaza felt like stepping into “bizarro world.”

“The way Trump was speaking, it was like Palestinians in Gaza existed in a vacuum, when the person responsible for their suffering was standing there smirking to his left,” she said of Mr. Netanyahu. “They were acting like Gaza had the misfortune to be hit by some natural disaster.”

Before Mr. Netanyahu’s arrival, Ms. Elhaddad was part of a legal action by the Center for Constitutional Rights that called on the Justice Department to enforce the I.C.C. arrest warrant issued against the Israeli prime minister in November for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. The department did not enforce the warrant, and Ms. Elhaddad said she had not expected it to do so.

“Netanyahu said clearly at the beginning of the war that the goal was to make Gaza uninhabitable, and they destroyed anything that sustains life — the infrastructure, the schools and universities, the fishing fleets,” said Ms. Elhaddad. “So now is Trump proposing that he will finish their plans for them?”

That was also a fear for Taher Herzallah, 35, a graduate student in Minnesota. He said he “almost burst into laughter” when he heard the news of Mr. Trump’s proposal on Tuesday night because, he said, “it’s all one giant absurdity.”

But that sense of ridiculousness was tempered by darker feelings a day later.

Mr. Herzallah said he believed that the proposal amounted to an “ethnic cleansing” of the Gaza Strip, where he has already lost 33 family members during the war.

The announcement of the cease-fire provided his relatives with a brief moment of guarded optimism, he said. But that was extinguished on Tuesday.

“I feel a deep sense of dread of what’s to come,” he said. “My family has suffered unimaginable, unimaginable pain.”

Community leaders in Dearborn, Mich., a town whose largely Arab population has made it a frequent bellwether of Arab-American politics and popular opinion, said many residents were in a state of shock after Mr. Trump’s remarks.

But Mohamed Baja, a Trump supporter who works as the chef at a local restaurant, said maybe the president’s proposal could work out. “This violence has been going on for 60-70 years,” he said. “So maybe this one time things could work out. Maybe a couple of countries will take” Gaza’s inhabitants.

But, he added, he immigrated to the United States from Lebanon and is not Palestinian.

“It’s up to Gaza, not to me,” he said. “It’s not my land.”

Ernesto Londoño, Katherine Rosman, Sharon Otterman and Mary Chapman contributed reporting.