'Not a word of this was ever mentioned': Trump's Gaza policy caught his closed advisers off guard
President Donald Trump’s “outrageous” plans for Gaza caught officials off guard and even his top advisers were unaware it was coming, according to a report.
While the president’s plans for the U.S. to take ownership of Gaza and turn it from “a hellhole” to a “Middle Eastern Riviera” was reportedly formulated “over time,” his unveiling of the idea on Tuesday night was a shock to some of his inner-circle, CNN reported.
Trump, who revealed the plans alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, did not rule out sending American troops to the war-torn enclave.
One Middle East adviser to the president, speaking on the condition of anonymity with the network, said they were “stunned” and had not heard about the plans until Trump revealed it during his press conference. But others reportedly heard about the plans in the days before the meeting with Netanyahu.
Discussions around the ceasefire and wider tensions in the Middle East had been discussed with senior Republicans in recent weeks, however, aides told CNN that the specific Gaza proposal had not come up in private meetings between Trump and Republican members of the Armed Services Committees.
“Not a word of this was ever mentioned by the president,” a senior Republican aide told the network.
The idea reportedly came together because Trump and his team wanted to break a “cycle” of failed peace talks on Gaza.
His closest Middle East advisers, national security adviser Mike Waltz and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, reportedly knew of the plans ahead of time and discussed the idea with the Israeli leader the night before the conference, an official told CNN.
“The notion of lather, rinse, repeat — let’s do the same thing in Gaza we’ve done for decades isn’t going to sustain,” the White House official told CNN. “We’ve been in this loop, this cycle … for too long and it isn’t working.”
Marco Rubio, Trump’s Secretary of State, only heard about the plans for the first time while watching the press conference on television, according to CNN.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Wednesday told reporters that Trump had been working to formulate the plan for “some time.”
But when pressed further, she said it had been initially “written in the President’s remarks last night as he revealed it to the world and to the American people.”
The Independent has contacted the White House for further comment.
Trump claimed that “everybody” he had spoken to about the plan “loves the idea of the United States owning that piece of land, developing and creating thousands of jobs with something that will be magnificent.”
