Kushner proposed relocating Gaza population a year ago
Kushner said at the time: ‘Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable if people would focus on building up livelihoods’

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Former senior advisor to former President Donald Trump Jared Kushner is interviewed on August 23, 2022 in New York City.
President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and former senior advisor Jared Kushner suggested relocating Gaza’s population and remarked on the real estate potential of its beachfront property nearly a year before the president called on Tuesday for the U.S. to “take over the Gaza Strip” and “create an economic development area.”
Kushner gave an interview to Harvard’s Middle East Initiative in March 2024, a time in which the IDF was operating in southern Gaza to reach the Philadelphi Corridor between Gaza and Egypt.
The former senior advisor recommended that Israel clear out an area of the Negev and allow Gazan refugees to stay there so the IDF “can go in and finish the job.”
However, Kushner made clear that his suggestion was not his first choice and it was only because Egypt would not take in Palestinians.
”You want to get as many civilians out of Rafah as possible,” he said, referring to the city in the southern Gaza Strip. “You want to get them out, maybe with diplomacy, get them into Egypt. I know that’s been refused, but with the right diplomacy I think that would be possible.”
Kushner noted the double standard applied to refugees from Gaza as opposed to other conflicts, pointing out that Turkey and Europe took in refugees from the Syrian civil war.
“With Israel, it’s a different thing,” he said. “For whatever reason, there are Gazan refugees from fighting an offensive attack staged from Gaza. Israel is going in to do a long-term deterrence mission. It’s unfortunate that no one is taking the refugees.”
Kushner said the Biden administration “should have done a better job to find a solution to that. As a broker, I think there would have been a way.”
Trump’s son-in-law also pointed to the lucrative potential of Gazan real estate, in remarks that made headlines at the time. Contrary to how much of the reporting was framed, in context, Kushner’s remark was not about future plans for the area, but rather made in contrast with what Hamas terrorists did with the land in their control.
”The question is how we deal with the terrorist threat that’s there so it cannot be a threat to Israel or Egypt,” he said. “Neither side wants to have a terrorist enclave right between them. Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable if people would focus on building up livelihoods. You think about all this money that’s gone into this tunnel network and into all of the ammunition — if that would have gone into education or innovation, what could have been done.”
Kushner later criticized in a post on X those “dishonestly using selected parts of my remarks … to sensationalize … I stand by this and believe the Palestinian people’s lives will improve ONLY when the international community and their citizenry start demanding accountability from their leadership.”
Kushner does not have an official role in the current Trump administration.
Yet, according to a Wednesday report in The Wall Street Journal, Trump floated a version of his idea to move all Palestinians out of Gaza long before returning the presidency, in his meeting with Netanyahu at Mar-a-Lago in July.
Trump has suggested relocating Gaza’s population several times in recent weeks and delved further into the details of his plans in a photo-op and press conference with Netanyahu at the White House on Tuesday.
Trump said that he envisioned “permanently” moving all of the Palestinians out of Gaza to several locations, not only Jordan and Egypt as he had mentioned earlier.
The U.S. “will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it too,” Trump said. “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, create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area.”
“I do see a long-term ownership position,” the president added. “Everybody I’ve spoken to loves the idea of the United States owning that piece of land, developing and creating thousands of jobs with something that will be magnificent in a really magnificent area.”
The U.S. would turn Gaza into an “international, unbelievable place … the Riviera of the Middle East,” he said.
Despite Trump’s past arguments against sending American troops to the Middle East, the president said that he would send the U.S. military to Gaza “if necessary.”