President Donald Trump’s eyebrow-raising support for removing Palestinians from Gaza and relocating them elsewhere was subjected to a cold slap of reality Tuesday night by a CNN anchor who questioned the legality and practicality of the suggestion.
“It’s preposterous and it's illegal by any understanding of international law that you would forcibly move people away from their homes,” CNN’s Jim Sciutto, the network’s chief national security analyst, said on air.
Sciutto’s reaction came just moments after Trump delivered a second set of remarks at a news conference alongside Israel’s far-right Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, where the MAGA president announced to the world that the United States could take command of the Gaza strip and flip it from a “demolition site” into the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
“I mean, the agency here, right, is the agency of the Palestinian people,” the anchor told his colleague Erin Burnett. “Are they going to be frog marched out of their country by U.S. forces as it's then rebuilt as a Riviera by presumably U.S. property developers? That seems to be what the president – it's not 'seems to be' what the president is suggesting, it is what the president is suggesting in so many words.”
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Sciutto openly worried that Trump, a former real estate developer, appeared to be “applying this principle” to other parts of the world. He cited as examples Trump’s desire for Greenland to “apply pressure” to Denmark to fulfill his wish for the United States to acquire the territory and made the same case for the president's threats of taking over the Panama Canal.
“Same with Panama – violate a decades-old treaty to take back the Panama Canal, where is the agency of the nations whose territory is sovereign? Right? Much like the Palestinian people in Gaza.”
The CNN anchor concluded by saying that it “seems to be a Trump worldview here that requires moving people off their land.”
“The other piece, I would say it requires two other countries giving up their land, right? Jordan and Egypt, to become new homes for the Palestinian people,” Sciutto said. “And by the way, their leaders have said they have no interest in doing that.”
Watch the clip below or at this link:
