President Donald Trump’s calls for the United States to “take over” and “develop” the Gaza Strip have handed jihadist terrorist groups a rallying cry to recruit and inspire attacks against Americans at home and abroad, security experts and former intelligence officials say.
Trump’s comments this week, proposing that the United States would control the Palestinian enclave while its residents would be forced to relocate abroad, have caused shock and outrage around the world — and terrorists will pounce on that anger to attract more support and organize attacks, experts said.
“I think every CIA station chief in the Middle East woke up this morning with a migraine headache, because there’s a potential for a generational counterterrorism nightmare here,” Marc Polymeropoulos, a former CIA officer who worked in the region, said Wednesday in an interview on MSNBC's "Morning Joe."
Polymeropoulos highlighted the language Trump has used in recent days — that the United States would "take over" and "own" Gaza.
“These are triggering mechanisms for Islamic extremist groups,” he said, adding, “This kind of language only is going to galvanize groups that want to kill Americans."
U.S. law enforcement and intelligence officials have repeatedly warned in recent months of a heightened global terrorist threat, mainly due to the fallout from the 15-month Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.
Israel launched an invasion of Gaza after Hamas militants staged a surprise attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing 1,200 people, most of them civilians. More than 46,000 Palestinians have been killed in the fighting in the enclave, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.
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The Islamic State and other jihadist extremists have seized on the Gaza conflict and the suffering of Palestinian civilians as material for propaganda and to encourage attacks on governments painted as enemies of Muslims, said Lucas Webber, senior threat analyst at Tech Against Terrorists, a nonprofit organization.
“This most recent development will hypercharge these existing trends and provide fodder for the Islamic State to tap into it and leverage it to build support, empower its rhetoric, recruit and even incite violence,” Webber said.
Pro-ISIS propagandists have already started to highlight Trump’s comments on social media, portraying his language as a vindication of their labeling the United States as an enemy of Muslims, according to Webber.
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., called Trump’s remarks “literally bulletin board recruiting material today for our terrorist enemies, whether or not we ever go into Gaza.”
“The idea that we’re going to clear Gaza out of Palestinians, that drives young men to extremist groups, to violence, to groups that are based around violence,” Murphy, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, said Wednesday in an interview on MSNBC's "Morning Joe."
The White House has defended Trump’s comments, saying he has shown a willingness to question conventional wisdom about the Middle East and scored a breakthrough in his first term by securing an agreement between Israel and four Arab countries to establish diplomatic ties.
Brian Hughes, spokesman for the White House National Security Council, said the same lawmakers and former officials now criticizing the president once “claimed the Middle East would devolve into violence after President Trump moved the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem or recognized the Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights.”
“The truth is President Trump is the only president to broker a peace agreement between four Muslim-majority countries and Israel," Brian Hughes, a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council, said in an email. "He’s the only modern-day president to have a record of success in the Middle East."
Both Murphy and Polymeropoulos previously sharply criticized Trump’s decision in his first term to move the American embassy to Jerusalem, warning of possible violence or potential damage to relations with Arab allies.
Trump has defended his remarks on Gaza and renewed his calls for a U.S. takeover, though he said Thursday it would not involve American boots on the ground.
In past decades, suicide terrorist attacks have spiked in response to the U.S. or other foreign militaries’ occupying, or being perceived to be occupying, territory that terrorists see as their homeland, according to research by Robert Pape, a professor of international relations at the University of Chicago.
The 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and the subsequent occupation touched off “the largest suicide terrorist campaign in modern times,” said Pape, who has compiled a database of thousands of suicide attacks worldwide.
As the United States has scaled back its military footprint in the Middle East, the relative terrorist threat against it has receded since the U.S. war in Iraq, he said.
But Trump’s vow to exert U.S. authority over Gaza gives groups like ISIS a major boost and puts Americans in the crosshairs, Pape said.
“It’s really been quite some time since they’ve had this shot of energy,” he said. “A group like Al Qaeda has been desperate for something like this.”
Jihadist militants will most likely try to organize terrorist attacks against U.S. targets to signal to Washington that they will not tolerate a possible U.S. occupation, he said.
“They will start attacking Americans to deter us from starting down this road again,” Pape said.
Christopher O’Leary, a former senior FBI official who worked on counterterrorism cases, said Trump’s language could prompt Palestinian militants to focus on targeting Americans abroad and possibly inside the United States, something not seen since the 1970s and ’80s.
And jihadist extremists will seize on his words to stoke anger and paint a picture of the United States as a foreign occupier, he said.
“Global jihadist groups will also use a narrative of the United States occupying Arab lands as a rallying cry for new recruits,” said O’Leary, senior vice president at the Soufan Group, a global security consultancy.
O’Leary and other former government officials said Trump’s statements were especially worrying as they coincide with a time of uncertainty and upheaval at U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
In recent days the Trump administration has launched a review of the conduct of FBI agents who worked on cases related to the Jan. 6, 2021, attacks on the Capitol, and it is seeking to drastically reduce the federal workforce by offering so-called buyouts to employees at the FBI, the CIA and elsewhere.
“The addition of the Gaza announcement coupled with the erosion of our security services could really elevate the terrorist threat,” O’Leary said.
Trump’s proposal to take control of Gaza — and potentially expel the roughly 2.2 million Palestinians living there — has sparked fury and confusion in the Middle East and around the world. Many foreign government officials, regional analysts and human rights groups say his plan amounts to ethnic cleansing.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt sought to play down and walk back his comments Wednesday.
But Trump doubled down Thursday, defending his proposal and saying the United States could take over Gaza without needing to send U.S. troops.
Trump said on Truth Social that Palestinians could be “resettled in far safer and more beautiful communities, with new and modern homes, in the region.” His contradictory comments added fresh confusion about the future of Palestinians in Gaza.
Even if Trump renounces his comments or never follows through on his ideas about U.S. control of Gaza, jihadist militants now believe the United States — which has already invaded one Muslim country in the Middle East — has its sights set on the Gaza Strip, Pape and other analysts said.
The damage has been done, Pape said. “We’re not getting ourselves out of this by somehow spinning the facts.”
