By Retired Lt Colonel Samsudeen Sarr
In a move that sent geopolitical tremors rippling across the world, US president Donald Trump stunned the global stage on Tuesday, 4th January, 2025, with an announcement as audacious as it was incendiary.
Standing before a sea of cameras with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu nodding and smiling approvingly beside him, Trump declared his intention to seize the Gaza Strip, expel every Palestinian from its soil, and transform it into what he brazenly called “real estate”.
The sheer gravity of this pronouncement cannot be overstated. For decades, the international community has clung to the vision of a two-state solution — a fragile but persistent hope for Palestinians to finally claim a sovereign nation of their own alongside Israel. Yet this dream has been repeatedly sabotaged by Israel’s unrelenting settlement expansion, bolstered by the steady support of successive US administrations.
Now, Trump has shattered any remaining illusion of diplomacy, throwing petrol on an already raging inferno. But one question looms large: How will Israel’s most fanatical Zionist hardliners react? These are the very forces who have ceaselessly pushed for the annexation of Palestinian land, methodically carving up the West Bank and turning Gaza into an open-air prison.
They have long seen the strip as a final frontier, especially after the relentless 15-month war that left the territory battered and bleeding. Could it be that Trump’s bombshell was not merely a wild, unfiltered outburst but a calculated ploy to appease Netanyahu’s extremist coalition — factions that have been holding his government hostage over the recent ceasefire? If these nationalist zealots abandon him, Netanyahu’s fragile grip on power will disintegrate, leaving him vulnerable to the legal vultures circling overhead, eager to see him indicted. Trump’s sudden, swaggering focus is all the more perplexing given that, only days earlier, he had basked in global applause for brokering the elusive ceasefire, just in time for his January 20 inauguration. The Biden administration had feebly attempted to lay claim to the diplomatic breakthrough, but Netanyahu himself squashed the debate, bluntly crediting Trump as the sole architect of the peace deal. And yet, barely a breath later, Trump has flung the region back into chaos with his astonishing decree. His proclamation that he would snatch Gaza from its “rightful owners, the Palestinians” has triggered a wave of global condemnation. Legal scholars decry it as a flagrant violation of international law; human rights activists call it a grotesque act of ethnic cleansing. If Trump presses forward, he will stand in direct contradiction to the image he carefully sculpted during his campaign — a supposed champion of peace, an outsider promising to end America’s disastrous foreign entanglements. He had scoffed at the so-called “endless wars” of his predecessors, blaming Democrats for the bloodshed in Ukraine and Gaza under Biden’s watch. Even Arab-American voters, many of whom had defected from the Democratic Party in the hope that Trump would deliver a ceasefire, now find themselves betrayed. The man they saw as a potential peace-broker has, in an instant, revealed himself as an architect of war. The anti-war movement, which had cautiously welcomed Trump’s diplomatic overtures, is now in a state of panic. His ceasefire deal had sparked optimism that he might also push for an end to the Ukrainian conflict — another war many hold Biden accountable for prolonging. But now, with Trump refusing to rule out deploying American troops to enforce his “real estate plan,” even some Republican senators are recoiling, branding the scheme as reckless, unjust, and impossible to execute.
For all his bluster, Trump’s vision for Gaza is not a bold business venture — it is a blueprint for carnage. The so-called “real estate plan” is nothing less than a declaration of war against Palestinian resistance. And if history has taught us anything, it is that such wars, once unleashed, rarely stay contained.
The audacious proposal to seize the Gaza Strip by expelling its two million Palestinian residents — erasing an entire population to pave the way for new settlers, neither necessarily Israeli nor Palestinian — has ignited a firestorm of global condemnation. From the hallowed halls of the United Nations to the chambers of the Arab League, from the corridors of the European Union to the diplomatic strongholds of the United Kingdom and Russia, world leaders have denounced the plan as a flagrant violation of international law. The Geneva Conventions, the International Court of Justice, and the UN Charter stand in unanimous judgment: such an act is nothing short of ethnic cleansing — a war crime in its most unvarnished form. Donald Trump’s appeal to Egypt and Jordan to absorb the displaced Palestinians has been met with an unyielding and unequivocal rejection.
The notion of forcing Hamas fighters across their borders is not just reckless but a potential catalyst for chaos, threatening to unravel the very fabric of those nations’ stability. The spectre of governmental collapse in Cairo and Amman looms large, should this gambit proceed. Anticipation now turns to the next wave of global rebuke. Among those expected to raise their voices is the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), whose chairman, none other than our own president, His Excellency Adama Barrow, carries the weight of moral and diplomatic responsibility. To remain silent now — especially given The Gambia’s longstanding advocacy for the two-state solution at the United Nations, the African Union, and Ecowas — would not just be a diplomatic misstep but a tacit endorsement of Trump’s unilateral march toward disaster.
It is impossible to ignore the stark irony: on 15th September, 2020, a triumphant Donald Trump stood on the White House balcony, flanked by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the foreign ministers of the UAE and Bahrain, heralding the Abraham Accords as the dawn of a “new Middle East”. One by one, Sudan, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia followed suit, their diplomatic embrace of Israel once seen as an irreversible tide. But history, ruthless in its judgments, is already rewriting the script. The ongoing carnage in Gaza, coupled with Trump’s latest declaration, has shattered the very foundation of those accords, reducing them from a celebrated breakthrough to a forgotten relic. Now, as the world waits, the question looms: will Trump’s ominous four-week timeline culminate in a decisive ceasefire or an even bloodier chapter of conflict—one widely condemned as genocidal? The answer is uncertain, but one thing is clear: silence is complicity, and history is watching.
Retired Lt Colonel Samsudeen Sarr, is a former commander of the Gambia National Army, diplomat and author of several books.
