President Trump “gaggled” with reporters aboard Air Force One as he traveled to Israel on Sunday to welcome the hostages home from Gaza and attend the official signing of the deal with Hamas. “The war is over, OK. Do you understand that?” Trump said. “I think people are going to behave. Everybody knows their place.” A reporter asked: “If the ceasefire does hold, how long until we get to the part of the 20-point peace plan where developers can go in and make Gaza the Riviera of the Middle East?” “I don’t know about the Riviera for a while,” Trump said. “You have to get people taken care of first, but it’s going to start really essentially immediately.” “I mean, they’re going to have to start by removing a lot of the structures that you see that are down to the ground. I mean, it’s a very-it’s blasted. This is like a demolition site, almost the entire site is, so you have to get rid of what you have there,” he said. “In a year from now? That’s very quick, but over the years it will look very good. It’s got the first chance it’s had in centuries of being peaceful. It’s always been a very, very strange area. It’s always been loaded up with problems-religious problems, problems like no other place probably in the world-and I think it’s now going to normalize. All you can say-if it normalizes, that would be-that you have set up in that peace plan.” “We have a lot of verbal guarantees,” the president said. “And I don’t think they’re going to want to disappoint me. I have a lot of verbal guarantees-guarantees that aren’t down in writing, but they were given to me, and I believe they’re going to be held very strongly. That’s why I think it’s going to be successful.” “You have to understand, they’ve lost probably 60,000 people. That’s a lot of retribution. They’ve lost 60,000 people, and the ones that are living right now were in many cases very young when this all started. And we are having them watch that there’s not going to be big crime or some of the problems that you have when you have areas like this that have been literally demolished. You know, you have 2 million people-and probably it will be less than that-but you have close to 2 million people going back to buildings that have been demolished. And a lot of bad things can happen, so we want it to be-we want it to be safe. I think it’s going to be fine. Who knows for sure.”
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