Given all of the above-mentioned points, a US invasion and occupation of Gaza, coupled with ethnic cleansing, is on every level nonsensical. It is a murderous and genocidal endeavor that makes no sense to anyone.
While even Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has started to backtrack on behalf of his American counterpart, correcting Donald Trump on his Gaza invasion threats, elements of the US President’s rhetoric still dominate the discourse on a post-war outcome for Palestinians.
Laid out as part of Palestine Chronicle’s previous Analysis article on the topic, the likelihood of Donald Trump’s plan to take “ownership” of the Gaza Strip is low. It is in fact more likely that his words were a calculated verbal “shock and awe” tactic, employed in order to keep together Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right coalition, cover for its inability to defeat Hamas, and create leverage for further Israeli expansionism.
What Trump’s Gaza “Ownership” Would Look Like
Donald Trump presented his Gaza plans as “outside of the box” thinking, ultimately aiming to create prosperity for the “people of the area”. The wording employed here is rather well thought out, on the one hand, it sounds like a very thoughtful humanitarian gesture to his base of followers, many of whom are completely clueless of the realities on the ground, while also fulfilling the wildest dreams of the most hardline Zionist extremists.
It is clear from observing the public responses that there are two ways Trump’s remarks were received: a majority of people heard it as a declaration of war and to ethnically cleanse millions of Palestinians, while at least a portion of his base heard it as a humanitarian real estate arrangement.
The truth, assuming that his words were actually intended to translate to policy, is that this would constitute a full-scale invasion and violent expulsions of already displaced refugees.
The some dozen Palestinian resistance groups operating inside the Gaza Strip violently resisted an Israeli full-scale onslaught, backed by the United States and European nations, for 15 months. Despite the Israeli PM repeatedly stressing that his war goals entailed “destroying Hamas” and returning the Israeli captives held in Gaza by force, his armed forces failed to complete these missions.
Although this may sound counter-intuitive, a US invasion of Gaza would result in a far greater soldier casualty count than the Palestinian armed groups managed to inflict against Israeli forces. Why you may ask? Because Israel never actually devised a plan to defeat the Palestinian armed groups, instead it inflicted a genocide, pulverized almost all the territory’s infrastructure and would occasionally commit targeted assassinations.
The ideas floated at the beginning of the war, that Israeli soldiers would be going door-to-door and street-to-street with ground forces, clearing areas, engaging in fierce battles and penetrating Gaza’s underground tunnel system, simply did not materialize. Even in the occasional cases where special forces teams were used to attempt to extract captives, penetrate a tunnel or ambush a Palestinian armed force, they were scarcely able to produce any tangible results. These operations were the exception and not the rule.
What occurred on the ground during the 15-month-long war, was that Palestinian fighters devised an ambush and artillery fire strategy. Its operations can be broken down into three primary categories: Ambushes on Israeli stationary positions, ambushes on moving convoys, and short-medium range artillery attacks.
The approach adopted by the Palestinian fighters was a well-prepared strategy. It sought to preserve ammunition due to a lack of any supply lines into Gaza, while also using effective tactics to inflict maximum casualties and disable military vehicles. Unlike Lebanese Hezbollah, which sought to hold territory and repel advances, the fighters in Gaza allowed Israeli forces to advance and tied them up in deadly ambushes.
There are a few isolated cases where the Palestinian armed groups did try to temporarily hold territory and prevent Israeli advances, such as occurred during the second major invasion of Jabalia Refugee Camp in May of 2024.
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Meanwhile, to put it bluntly, the Israeli soldiers didn’t really fight. They abandoned accepted military rationale. Instead, they decided to send their forces inside heavily armored military vehicles in order to penetrate an area, before creating fortified positions. The Israelis did not even put infantry forces in front or beside their tanks when advancing, relying on the efficiency of their medical-evacuation procedures and armor/active protection systems, to minimize soldier deaths.
Although its casualty figures are not reliable, Israel officially announced that 15,000 soldiers were injured during the 15-month war, and around 800 were killed. This is a ratio of roughly 33 injuries for every death, which is a much higher injury-to-death rate compared with other modern urban warfare settings.
The fact that there is scarcely any footage from Israeli soldiers that shows them engaged in direct combat, while the Palestinian armed groups released a near daily stream of videos featuring their stunning ambushes, tells this story for itself.
There are plenty of videos documenting the majority of the Israeli army’s work, however, which was rounding up civilians, blowing up homes, smashing neighborhoods with bulldozers, and arbitrarily killing unarmed people. This was coupled with hundreds of videos proudly uploaded by individual soldiers, featuring them wearing women’s underwear, defecating on floors of homes, destroying stores, etc.
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It suffices to say that if the US military invades Gaza, which is what would be required to go through with Donald Trump’s proposed ethnic cleansing, American soldiers would actually have to fight a war, unlike the Israelis who were too afraid of casualties to actually go after the Palestinian resistance in a meaningful way.
An experienced Palestinian resistance force, armed with weapons made from the countless unexploded Israeli ordinances, would face off against a US invading force that would have to navigate their way on foot through area after area and penetrate the underground tunnel systems.
American soldiers would be ambushed constantly, falling victim to sniper fire, IEDs, RPGs and round-the-clock artillery fire. If they set up checkpoints, they will likely be attacked too and if the goal is to occupy Gaza, then it will likely mean a constant stream of dead US soldiers over a period of years. While casualty counts are incredibly difficult to predict, it’s safe to say that thousands of American service members could be killed.
In order to plan such an invasion, which would likely mean deploying around 150,000 soldiers to the area, it could take around 8 months of preparations. The cost could travel into the hundreds of billions, while there is no guarantee that the plan would even work, meaning a possible US defeat at the hands of Hamas; purely based upon the ability of the Palestinian Party to survive and Gaza’s people remaining.
The Arab Regimes and the Collapse of Normalization
Assuming now that Donald Trump succeeds at ethnically cleansing a significant portion of Gaza’s population to Egypt and Jordan, both of these countries would be destabilized; especially Jordan.
According to leaked reports, Cairo has privately communicated its position that the mass displacement of Palestinians into Egypt could cause them to reconsider their normalisation treaty with Israel. Some have even speculated that the Egyptian army could be forced to act against the Israelis. Meanwhile, Middle East Eye reported that Amman could threaten military action over the issue.
While the idea of the Jordanian and Egyptian militaries launching any kind of offensive action against Israel is rather far-fetched, the collapse of their normalisation agreements is not. Both nations are struggling financially and the prospect of civil unrest instills fear in the hearts of their leaderships.
In Jordan, an influx of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from Gaza is a recipe for destabilization. To begin with, the ability to absorb such a high volume of people is all but non-existent. Yet, the most important takeaway is that the only place to settle this population would be in areas that are close to the border with occupied Palestine.
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On top of the issues with the State’s infrastructure to absorb such a sudden population influx, many of whom will need to be treated for various injuries and ailments, is the combined factor of the Jordanian population’s reaction. Most of the Jordanian public are Palestinians, expelled from their homeland during the Nakba (1947-9), Naksa (1967) and in 1970-71.
Huge portions of Jordan’s citizenry, who are already emotionally fed up with the inaction during the Gaza genocide, will be livid at their Hashemite ruler for participating in the ethnic cleansing.
Now you have an economically suffering and politically charged public who will be united with a refugee population, many of whom would have resistance fighters or political figures in their families. It is an uprising against Israel waiting to happen, and inside the country that shares the largest land border with Israel. In the event that a revolutionary movement that sought to fight the Israelis emerged, the Jordanian State would be fractured and the movement is right next to Iraq and Syria, making weapons smuggling simple.
In Egypt, the prospects for the above-mentioned scenario are much lower, but even if a small group of Egyptians and/or Palestinians decide to launch an assault on an Israeli border position, it could provoke an incursion into the Sinai by Tel Aviv.
All of these scenarios are by no means guaranteed, but especially in the case of Jordan, ethnic cleansing is a recipe for chaos just waiting to happen. Nobody in the region is going to forget what happened to the Gaza Strip, despite the relative inaction we have witnessed recently.
Eventually, the genocide in Gaza will inspire more people to resist and this is something the Arab leaders all understand well. The Nakba already left an irreversible scar on the Arab World’s psyche, what happened in Gaza has inflicted another that dwarfs the former.
Amman and Cairo fear the repercussions of Donald Trump’s plans, because they will impact them directly. In addition to this, Israel will be the one threatened the most under such a scenario. As for the US and its ability to form relationships across the region, it will be further from a Saudi-Israeli normalisation deal than it has ever been.
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For the United States, Trump has no popular mandate, let alone a legal one. The costs of his proposal would be financially enormous, while the loss of life amongst his soldiers would inflict a serious wound on his credibility. The surrounding Arab nations would undoubtedly be destabilized, if not toppled. While the Israelis themselves could end up facing the greatest strategic threat in their history.
Former US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in one of his final foreign policy speeches, given at an event organized by the Atlantic Council think-tank, even warned of the possible repercussions of the US and Israel not pursuing a Palestinian State.
While the first portion of Blinken’s address was geared around supporting Washington’s propaganda talking points, he did give credible sober warnings in the speech’s latter half, contradicting the former portion. He warned of the collapse of Tel Aviv’s normalisation treaties with Egypt and Jordan, claiming that this could be a reality in the foreseeable future in the absence of a “Two-State solution”.
Given all of the above-mentioned points, a US invasion and occupation of Gaza, coupled with ethnic cleansing, is on every level nonsensical. It is a murderous and genocidal endeavor that makes no sense to anyone.
(The Palestine Chronicle)
– Robert Inlakesh is a journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. He focuses on the Middle East, specializing in Palestine. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
