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The Trump administration is working on a plan to permanently relocate up to 1 million Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to Libya, five people with knowledge of the effort told NBC News.
The plan is under serious enough consideration that the administration has discussed it with Libya's leadership, two people with direct knowledge of the plans and a former U.S. official said.
In exchange for the resettling of Palestinians, the administration would potentially release to Libya billions of dollars of funds that the U.S. froze more than a decade ago, those three people said.
No final agreement has been reached, and Israel has been kept informed of the administration's discussions, the same three sources said.
The State Department and the National Security Council did not respond to multiple requests for comment before this article was published. After publication, a spokesperson told NBC News, "these reports are untrue."
"The situation on the ground is untenable for such a plan. Such a plan was not discussed and makes no sense," the spokesperson said.
Basem Naim, a senior Hamas official, said that Hamas, the U.S.-designated terrorist group that has run Gaza, was not aware of any discussions about moving Palestinians to Libya.
"Palestinians are very rooted in their homeland, very strongly committed to the homeland and they are ready to fight up to the end and to sacrifice anything to defend their land, their homeland, their families, and the future of their children," Naim said in response to questions from NBC News. "[Palestinians] are exclusively the only party who have the right to decide for the Palestinians, including Gaza and Gazans, what to do and what not to do."
Representatives of the Israeli government declined to comment.
Libya has been plagued by instability and warring political factions throughout the nearly 14 years since a civil war broke out in the country and its longtime dictator, Moammar Gadhafi, was toppled. Libya is struggling to care for its current population as two rival governments, one in the west led by Abdul Hamid Dbeibah and one in the east led by Khalifa Haftar, are actively and violently fighting for control. The State Department currently advises Americans not to travel to Libya "due to crime, terrorism, unexploded landmines, civil unrest, kidnapping, and armed conflict."
Dbeibah's government could not be reached for comment. Haftar's Libyan National Army did not respond to a request for comment.
How many Palestinians in Gaza would voluntarily leave to live in Libya is an open question. One idea administration officials have discussed is to provide Palestinians with financial incentives such as free housing and even a stipend, the former U.S. official said.
The details of when or how any plan to relocate Palestinians to Libya could be implemented are murky, and an effort to resettle up to 1 million people there would likely face significant obstacles.
Such an effort would likely be extremely expensive, and it's not clear how the Trump administration would seek to pay for it. In the past, the administration has said Arab nations would help with rebuilding Gaza after the war there ends, but they have been critical of Trump's idea of permanently relocating Palestinians.
In recent weeks, the Trump administration has also looked at Libya as a place where it could send some immigrants it wants to deport from the U.S. However, plans to send one group of immigrants to Libya were stalled by a federal judge this month.
Moving up to 1 million Palestinians to Libya could put far more of a strain on the fragile country.
The CIA's most recent publicly available estimate of Libya's current population is about 7.36 million. In terms of population, Libya absorbing 1 million more people would be equivalent to the U.S. taking in about 46 million.
Precisely where Palestinians would be resettled in Libya has not been determined, according to the former U.S. official. Administration officials are looking at options for housing them and every potential method for transporting them from Gaza to Libya — by air, land and sea —is being considered, according to one of the people with direct knowledge of the effort.
Any of those methods would likely prove cumbersome and time-consuming, as well as costly.
It would take around 1,173 flights on the world's largest passenger airplane, the Airbus A380, at its maximum passenger capacity to transport 1 million people, for instance. With no airport in Gaza, moving anyone from there on flights would first require transporting them to an airport in the region. If Israel does not want to allow Palestinians to come through its territory, the closest airport would be in Cairo, about 200 miles away.
Transportation by land from Gaza through Egypt to Benghazi, Libya's second-largest city, which is farther east than the capital, Tripoli, would require driving about 1,300 miles. Automobiles typically hold fewer passengers than other modes of transportation. About 55 people can fit in an intercity passenger bus.
Up to 2,000 people can fit on the top-end versions of some of the ferries the U.S. used to transport civilians along the Mediterranean Sea to escape Libya's civil war in 2011. If those vessels were to be used — and assuming that they didn't need to refuel and weather conditions were good — it would take hundreds of trips lasting more than a day each way for up to 1 million people to travel from Gaza to Benghazi.
The plan under discussion is part of President Donald Trump's vision for a postwar Gaza, which he said in February the U.S. would seek to "own" and rebuild as what he called "the Riviera of the Middle East," two current U.S. officials, the former U.S. official and the two people with direct knowledge of the effort said.
"We're going to take over that piece, develop it and create thousands and thousands of jobs, and it will be something the entire Middle East can be proud of," Trump said at the time.
To achieve his goal for the reconstruction of Gaza, Trump has said Palestinians there would have to be permanently resettled elsewhere.
"You can't live in Gaza right now, and I think we need another location. I think it should be a location that's going to make people happy," Trump said in February during a White House meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Trump outlined a goal of finding "a beautiful area to resettle people permanently in nice homes, and where they can be happy and not be shot, not be killed, not be knifed to death like what's happening in Gaza."
"I don't think people should be going back to Gaza," he said.
Trump's idea, which blindsided some of his top aides, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, when he announced it, drew criticism from America's Arab allies and U.S. lawmakers from both parties.
"We'll see what the Arab world says but, you know, that'd be problematic at many, many levels," Trump ally Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said at the time.
The U.S. and Israel in March also rejected a proposal from Egypt for rebuilding Gaza without relocating Palestinians.
The administration's work on a Libya plan comes as Trump's relationship with Netanyahu has become strained, in part because of Israel's decision to launch a new military offensive in Gaza.
The Trump administration has considered multiple locations for resettling Palestinians living in Gaza, according to a senior administration official, a former U.S. official familiar with the discussions and one of the people with direct knowledge of the effort.
Syria, with its new leadership following the ouster of Bashar al Assad in December, also is under discussion as a possible location for resettling Palestinians currently in Gaza, according to one of the people with direct knowledge of the effort and a former U.S. official familiar with the discussions.
The Trump administration has taken steps toward restoring diplomatic relations with Syria. Trump announced on Tuesday that the U.S. would lift sanctions on Syria and met briefly with the country's new leader, Ahmad al-Sharaa, on Wednesday.
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