What happened
Trump's own words left little ambiguity about what was being proposed: at a joint press conference with Netanyahu on 4 February 2025, he said the US would "own" Gaza, that Palestinians would not have "a right to return" once relocated, and that the territory would be redeveloped as a tourism and investment hub — explicitly comparing the vision to the reconstruction of a devastated area into luxury real estate. Administration officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, spent the following day publicly softening the framing, describing the relocation as temporary — Gazans would return once rubble was cleared and reconstruction complete — a walk-back that itself came only after the scale of international condemnation became clear, not because the original comments had been a misstatement corrected on the substance.
A more detailed version of the plan surfaced later in 2025 under the GREAT Trust name: it envisioned Gaza's population relocating "voluntarily" in exchange for digital tokens representing land and reconstruction value, the construction of six to eight AI-powered smart cities, and a manufacturing hub reportedly named in honour of Elon Musk. Critics, including human rights lawyers and Middle East policy analysts across the political spectrum, noted that describing a population's departure from land experiencing famine, ongoing bombardment, and total infrastructure collapse as "voluntary" does not meet any recognised legal or practical standard for a genuinely free choice.
The international response was close to unanimous rejection outside Israel's own governing coalition. Guterres's "ethnic cleansing" warning was echoed by the Arab League, the EU, and human rights organisations; Saudi Arabia — a government the first Trump administration had spent years courting toward Israeli normalisation — stated flatly it would not join the Abraham Accords process without a credible path to Palestinian statehood, and rejected displacement outright. The plan was never formally withdrawn, but it also was not the framework ultimately used for the October 2025 ceasefire and reconstruction process, which instead proceeded through the UN Security Council Resolution 2803 framework (see PalestineTimelineSeeder) — though real estate and "AI-powered" development language recurred in later reporting about the US-backed reconstruction vehicles being discussed for Gaza's postwar economy, including the same Gaza Humanitarian Foundation-adjacent financial backers documented in IsraelTimelineSeeder's account of the 2025 aid crisis.