Stephen A. Smith has joined an alarmed chorus of pundits denouncing President Donald Trump for his proposal Tuesday that “the U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip.” The sports commentator minced no words Thursday in reacting on his titular “Stephen A. Smith Show.”
“You have no business doing that,” he said about Trump. “Do you understand how the Gaza Strip has been ravaged? Do you understand what that area of this world looks like right now? … You have any idea? Have you seen the footage? Have you seen the wreckage?”
“It’s been reduced to rubble,” Smith continued. “It’s [un]inhabitable right now.”
Trump announced Tuesday during a news conference, after months of campaign promises last year to bring peace to the Mideast, that he wants the U.S. to “own” the 139 square miles of war-torn rubble — and develop it into the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
The Gaza Health Ministry estimates that more than 46,000 people have been killed there since Hamas killed more than 1,200 in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Smith railed against Trump on Thursday for arguing that the surviving population should simply be relocated after 15 months of bombardment.
“We’re talking about the displacement of potentially more than a million people,” said Smith about the besieged population of refugees. “And this man is there last night with [Israel Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu.”
Netanyahu, who has been accused of war crimes by the International Criminal Court, was beside Trump on Tuesday. He reportedly gifted Trump a golden beeper in a nod to Israel’s covert attack last year against suspected terrorists in Lebanon and Syria.
The attacks in September wounded thousands of people — and killed at least two children.
Israel said Thursday that preparations for the forcible removal of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip have already begun. The same day, Trump signed an order imposing sanctions against the International Criminal Court over its Israel probes.
The plan to flatten and rebuild Gaza, meanwhile, seems to have been floated for a while.
Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, a Middle East envoy during the president’s first term, said during an event at Harvard in 2024 that Gaza’s waterfront property “could be very valuable” — and, “from Israel’s perspective, I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up.”
Smith appeared genuinely disturbed Thursday about Trump moving forward with this vision, particularly as he ran on an “America First” platform to stay out of foreign conflicts.
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“I thought he didn’t want American soldiers in harm’s way,” said Smith on his show. “What do you think is going to happen if he follows through? That’s not safe … for America, because you’ll exacerbate the ire the Arab world already feels for the United States.”