National security adviser Mike Waltz said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that President Donald Trump wants to rebuild Gaza to make a “better life” for the Palestinians.
Host Kristen Welker said, “Let’s move over to Gaza, the president said he would take over Gaza and have American troops on the ground. Let me ask you, colonel, who is the White House’s plan of who will control Gaza once the war is over?”
Waltz said, “Well, right now the IDF the Israeli Defense Forces, have had to go in and will continue to destroy Hamas if they do not honor the terms of this ceasefire. So that’s point one. Point two, President Trump looks at this in very practical terms in the sense of are we going to repeat the definition of insanity here and pour billions in, rebuild and just have another October 7 again and another war years from now? Let’s look at the reality of having 1.8 million people sitting in piles of rubble with no sewage, with unexploded ordinance, and he’s asking in a humane way, what is going to happen to these people?”
He continued, “Everyone around the region says their heartbreaks for the Palestinians, rightly so, but then come to the table with your plan if you don’t like his plan and interestingly, we are seeing all kinds of outreach since the president made that statement of saying let’s help you take this on and so there’s conversations that are ongoing right now.”
Waltz said, “You can’t get to post-construction. You can’t make this the Paris of the mediterranean like Beirut was back in the ’70s and give these people a better life if you’ve got 1.8 million people living in absolute squalor in mountains and mountains and mountains of debris. President Trump is a builder and he’s a dealmaker in chief, and he understands that this just doesn’t make sense. So for anyone, the media included, that doesn’t like what he is proposing come to us with a better plan.”
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