'Angry', 'numb' - Palestinian Americans on Trump's Gaza comments
Laila El-HaddadPalestinian-Americans across the US have expressed outrage at Donald Trump's proposal for the US to "take over" Gaza, a place many of them still consider home.
"Our right of return, it's something we've thought about our whole lives," Iman Kishawi, who was born in Gaza but now lives in the Los Angeles area, told the BBC.
She said she was "very angry" over what President Trump has said, asking: "Who are you to own the land?"
Meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House on Tuesday, Trump proposed the idea that Palestinians could be resettled elsewhere while the US took ownership of the territory and turned it into the "Riviera of the Middle East".
Hosting a joint press conference with Netanyahu, the first international leader to visit the White House since Trump's inauguration, the president said: "The US will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it, too."
He added: "I do see a long-term ownership position, and I see it bringing great stability to that part of the Middle East."
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His proposition - a radical departure from decades of US policy - was met with backlash.
Laila El-Haddad, a Palestinian-American author and activist, said she was "stunned".
"It was appalling," the Maryland resident told the BBC.
"It just showed an utter sort of callous disdain and disregard for Palestinian lives and Palestinian humanity and Palestinian dignity, like it's as though they're just a pawn that are being played around with," she continued.
"He was talking about Palestinians as though, again, they existed in some vacuum, as though they had just been the unfortunate victims of some natural disaster."
Some Republicans have defended Trump or sought to clarify his remarks, while others have greeted the proposal with scepticism and confusion.
For many Palestinian Americans, the president's comments just reaffirm Gaza's situation.
Tariq Luthun, a Palestinian American living in Michigan, who once told the BBC that "every day I wake up, I check to see if family members are alive", said he was "pretty numb" to Trump's remarks.
He called Trump's proposal a continuation of "US imperialist policy".
Trump is "simply saying the quiet part out loud. This is the admission of what we have seen over the course of the past several decades", Mr Luthun added.
Iman Kishawi, who was born in Gaza in 1958 but fled because of war when she was seven years old, said she became "depressed a little" over the news.
"We need to give people a chance to live on their homeland," the Los Angeles-area resident said, adding that losing your home is like "losing your identity".
Just last month, after the announcement of a ceasefire following 15 months of fighting between Israel and Hamas, Ms Kishawi began contemplating her eventual return to Gaza.
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"I just have a yearning of going and belonging and helping my people," she said.
But that fantasy has been tossed into doubt - for now - following Trump's remarks.
"The minute you see hope coming, it's gone," Ms Kishawi said.
The current conflict started when hundreds of Hamas fighters stormed across Israel's southern border on 7 October 2023, killing about 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostages back to Gaza.
Israel responded with an air bombardment, then a full-scale ground invasion that has left more than 46,700 people - most of them civilians - dead, according to Gaza's Hamas-run health ministry.