Trump administration working on plan to move 1 million Palestinians to Libya

The Trump administration is working on a plan to permanently relocate up to 1 million Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to Libya, five people with knowledge of the effort told NBC News.

The plan is under serious enough consideration that the administration has discussed it with Libya’s leadership, two people with direct knowledge of the plans and a former U.S. official said. 

In exchange for the resettling of Palestinians, the administration would potentially release to Libya billions of dollars of funds that the U.S. froze more than a decade ago, those three people said.

No final agreement has been reached, and Israel has been kept informed of the administration’s discussions, the same three sources said.

The State Department and the National Security Council did not respond to multiple requests for comment before this article was published. After publication, a spokesperson told NBC News, “these reports are untrue.”

“The situation on the ground is untenable for such a plan. Such a plan was not discussed and makes no sense,” the spokesperson said.

Basem Naim, a senior Hamas official, said that Hamas, the U.S.-designated terrorist group that has run Gaza, was not aware of any discussions about moving Palestinians to Libya.

“Palestinians are very rooted in their homeland, very strongly committed to the homeland and they are ready to fight up to the end and to sacrifice anything to defend their land, their homeland, their families, and the future of their children,” Naim said in response to questions from NBC News. “[Palestinians] are exclusively the only party who have the right to decide for the Palestinians, including Gaza and Gazans, what to do and what not to do.”

Representatives of the Israeli government declined to comment. 

Libya has been plagued by instability and warring political factions throughout the nearly 14 years since a civil war broke out in the country and its longtime dictator, Moammar Gadhafi, was toppled. Libya is struggling to care for its current population as two rival governments, one in the west led by Abdul Hamid Dbeibah and one in the east led by Khalifa Haftar, are actively and violently fighting for control. The State Department currently advises Americans not to travel to Libya “due to crime, terrorism, unexploded landmines, civil unrest, kidnapping, and armed conflict.”

Dbeibah’s government could not be reached for comment. Haftar’s Libyan National Army did not respond to a request for comment.

How many Palestinians in Gaza would voluntarily leave to live in Libya is an open question. One idea administration officials have discussed is to provide Palestinians with financial incentives such as free housing and even a stipend, the former U.S. official said.

The details of when or how any plan to relocate Palestinians to Libya could be implemented are murky, and an effort to resettle up to 1 million people there would likely face significant obstacles.

Such an effort would likely be extremely expensive, and it’s not clear how the Trump administration would seek to pay for it. In the past, the administration has said Arab nations would help with rebuilding Gaza after the war there ends, but they have been critical of Trump’s idea of permanently relocating Palestinians.

In recent weeks, the Trump administration has also looked at Libya as a place where it could send some immigrants it wants to deport from the U.S. However, plans to send one group of immigrants to Libya were stalled by a federal judge this month. 

Moving up to 1 million Palestinians to Libya could put far more of a strain on the fragile country.

The CIA’s most recent publicly available estimate of Libya’s current population is about 7.36 million. In terms of population, Libya absorbing 1 million more people would be equivalent to the U.S. taking in about 46 million.

Precisely where Palestinians would be resettled in Libya has not been determined, according to the former U.S. official. Administration officials are looking at options for housing them and every potential method for transporting them from Gaza to Libya — by air, land and sea —is being considered, according to one of the people with direct knowledge of the effort.

Any of those methods would likely prove cumbersome and time-consuming, as well as costly.

It would take around 1,173 flights on the world’s largest passenger airplane, the Airbus A380, at its maximum passenger capacity to transport 1 million people, for instance. With no airport in Gaza, moving anyone from there on flights would first require transporting them to an airport in the region. If Israel does not want to allow Palestinians to come through its territory, the closest airport would be in Cairo, about 200 miles away. 

Transportation by land from Gaza through Egypt to Benghazi,…