More Than 115,000 Gazans Have Already Left

Plus, Tucker Carlson smears Elise Stefanik as “Israel First”

An image from an AI-generated Gaza Riviera video that President Trump posted to social media.

When Donald Trump floated his Gaza Riviera plan to allow the residents of the Gaza strip to leave for elsewhere, some critics attacked it on the grounds that Gazans are so attached to the territory that not many of them would want to leave.

A new research report from RAND Corp.’s National Security Research Division, which does research for “the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, the Unified Combatant Commands, the Navy, the Marine Corps, the defense agencies, and the defense intelligence enterprise,” casts doubt on that line of criticism.

“Some Gazans have already chosen to leave for other countries. As of June 2024, 115,000 Gazans (some 5 percent of the population) had crossed the border to Egypt,” says the new RAND report, “From Camps to Communities: Post-Conflict Shelter in Gaza.” “Others might choose to leave if they have an option to do so.”

The report suggests a range of options for housing what it says are 1.1 million displaced Gazans. “Given the unique characteristics of communities and the scale of the need, we anticipate that planning approaches will need to draw on all of the options described here, even those less optimal,” the report says, including, “in the short and medium term,” “Some people will leave Gaza, temporarily or permanently.”

Some of that is already happening. Cogat, the Israeli government arm for Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories, posted to social media, “Yesterday (March 27), we facilitated the departure of hundreds of sick Gazans and their relatives from Gaza for medical treatment abroad. Over the past few months, thousands of Gazans have exited for treatment, the majority to the UAE.”

Jordan has agreed to accept 2,000 Gazans, and they started to arrive there earlier this month. And the foreign minister of Somaliland, an unrecognized country on the horn of Africa, has expressed openness to negotiations about accepting Gazans—some reports say as many as a million of them.

This is a good example of how much of the press does a poor job of covering Trump and the Middle East. Trump suggests something, like that the Gazans will leave Gaza, and the press says that it is an outlandish proposal that is dead on arrival and will never happen. In reality, it already has happened and is continuing to happen.

Carlson on “Israel First” Elise Stefanik: Former Fox News personality Tucker Carlson lost his father on March 24, so he deserves more than the standard amount of grace, but his online media organization—with funding from Donald Trump Jr. and Omeed Malik’s 1789 Capital—keeps pumping out problematic content. (See “Tucker Carlson, Columbia, Hillsdale Stoke Jew-Hate With Anti-Israel Lies,” December 17, 2024, and “Tucker Carlson Attacks Editors Writer Wurmser,” January 26, 2025.)

The latest examples come in the Tucker Carlson Network “Morning Note,” an unsigned email. “Donald Trump dealt the Israel lobby a crushing blow on Thursday, revoking Elise Stefanik’s nomination to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations,” the Carlson email says. “Stefanik’s record suggests she would have proudly brought the Israel First agenda to the U.N., using her taxpayer-funded post to advance the foreign country’s interests at every turn. She has repeatedly insisted that the American government should unequivocally and unconditionally back and fund the Middle Eastern nuclear power.”

In a later section of the same newsletter, an article headlined “Neocons Are on the Prowl” again uses the phrase “Israel first” to question the loyalty of senators critical of Vice President Vance for his reluctance to use military force against the Iran-backed Houthis.

“The American people are simply not gung-ho about dropping everything to go die in the name of foreign interests that have nothing to do with the United States,” the newsletter says. “Neocons like Thursday’s anonymous senators will spend the current term trying to covertly chip away at Vance’s reputation before launching a full-scale character assassination in 2028. They’ve spent the past eight years betting that the Trump era is just a phase and that the GOP will quickly return to the days of the neoliberal Bush agenda once he’s gone.”

There’s something ugly—and false—about suggesting that Rep. Stefanik’s primary loyalty is to any country other than America. I recall January 2021, when the dean of the Harvard Kennedy School threw Elise Stefanik off a Harvard Institute of Politics advisory committee because, the dean said, she “has made public assertions about voter fraud in November’s presidential election that have no basis in evidence, and she has made public statements about court actions related to the election that are incorrect.”

One could blame Stefanik for managing to be abrasive enough to alienate both the Harvard left and the Tucker Carlson right, but I don’t think that is an accurate analysis of the situation. The issue is not so much Stefanik as it was Harvard and Tucker Carlson.