Via Jeff Mason, Matt Spetalnick, Steve Holland and Nidal Al-Mughrabi in reuters.com: Barely two weeks in the job, Trump shattered decades of U.S. policy on Tuesday with a vaguely worded announcement saying he envisioned transforming Gaza into the Riviera of the Middle East where international communities could coexist after nearly 16 months of Israeli bombardment devastated the coastal strip and killed more than 47,000 people, according to Palestinian tallies. At a White House briefing on Wednesday, press secretary Karoline Leavitt hailed his Gaza proposal as historic outside of the box thinking but stressed that the president had not committed to putting boots on the ground in the territory. She declined, however, to rule out the use of U.S. troops there. At the same time, Leavitt walked back Trumps earlier assertion that Gazans needed to be permanently resettled in neighboring countries, saying instead that they should be temporarily relocated for the rebuilding process. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio also said the idea was for Gazans to leave the territory for an interim period of reconstruction and debris-clearing.
