WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s proposal to take over the Gaza Strip would have to overcome or ignore many serious obstacles, including that forcibly removing its entire population would be a violation of international law.
But aside from legal challenges, there is the hard fact that unexploded munitions litter the territory after months of Israeli bombardment, posing a lethal danger to anyone in Gaza for the foreseeable future.
In his remarks unveiling the idea last week, Trump suggested that he had thought about it. “We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site,” he said.
The president has said he might send the military to Gaza as an occupation force, but federal law prohibits US troops from doing demining missions. Instead, that work falls to the State Department, which provides funding to nongovernmental organizations to do the job.
And that is where the White House has created an unforced problem for itself.
On Jan. 25, the State Department issued a stop-work order to all of the nonprofit organizations it funds to find, remove and destroy unexploded munitions around the world. Many of those charities would almost certainly be called on to clear Gaza once the fighting stops.
The UN agency responsible for monitoring global explosive contamination and funding many of those groups has asked the State Department for an exception to its 90-day hold on foreign aid so its lifesaving work could continue. But Secretary of State Marco Rubio rejected that request, according to a U.N. spokesperson.
The State Department provided no additional information on its decision.
The issue came up again Sunday, when Trump mentioned Gaza on his way to the Super Bowl. “Think of it as a big real estate site, and the United States is going to own it,” he said on Air Force One.
The Israeli military has used a wide array of explosive munitions in Gaza since the Hamas-led attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which killed about 1,200 people. Israel’s bombardment of the territory, mostly with US-made weapons, has killed more than 48,000 Palestinians since the start of the war, according to Gaza’s health ministry.
The number of weapons Israel has used against Gaza is not publicly known. But a New York Times investigation in December found that Israel had launched, fired or dropped nearly 30,000 munitions into the territory in the first seven weeks of the war, more than in the next eight months combined.
“Munitions like bombs, rockets or mortars have an inherent failure rate, but when used in an urban environment like Gaza, there is also potential for them to graze their targets instead of striking them squarely,” bomb-disposal expert Colin King said in an interview. “That can damage, deflect or slow them down enough that their fuses won’t work properly upon impact, causing them to not detonate and instead become unexploded hazards in an armed and highly unpredictable condition.”
Some bomb-disposal experts have said that as much as 10% of the weapons Israel has used in Gaza may have failed to explode and can remain as hazardous duds for decades or even centuries until they are found and cleared.
Locating and extracting deeply buried bombs – such as those Israel has dropped to attack Hamas tunnels — is rarely possible, according to Fenix Insight, a firm co-founded by King that provides technical support to munitions experts and deminers. Postwar reconstruction often begins with unexploded bombs remaining beneath the surface.
Fenix Insight has analyzed nearly 21,000 separate incidents involving explosive weapons used by Israel and Hamas in Gaza since the war began, King said, including duds, weapons caches and places where munitions exploded.
People who do such work are commonly called deminers, even though they are trained to clear explosive weapons of all kinds, not just land mines.
The United Nations Mine Action Service has had deminers in Gaza since 2009, and they have remained there throughout the war. Since the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas went into effect on Jan. 19, they have begun surveying the destroyed landscape for unexploded munitions as a crucial first step in their work.
The United States has spent about $5 billion on demining efforts in 125 countries since those efforts began in 1993, according to a recent State Department report.
That was two years before the United States normalized diplomatic relations with Vietnam.
Providing that funding was a sign of goodwill. US combat operations in Vietnam had ended 20 years earlier, but unexploded US weapons scattered about the country continued to kill scores of civilians every year after — as they did in Cambodia and Laos as well.
Nearly 50 years since the fall of Saigon, US munitions still kill civilians in all three of those Southeast Asian countries. Sometimes children find small round objects and think they are innocent playthings, when they are in fact deadly bomblets.
From 1965 to 1973, the US Air Force dropped nearly 770,000 cluster bombs during the war that released 346 million submunitions, according to military records. About 20% or more failed to detonate on impact for a variety of reasons, including poor quality control during production. In some cases, pilots under fire dropped them at such a high speed and low altitude that the bomblets did not arm properly before hitting the ground.
In 2017, Trump reversed a 2008 policy that would have eliminated cluster munitions from the Pentagon’s arsenal. Then in 2020, his administration made anti-personnel land mines more widely available for US forces to use in combat, undoing roughly 25 years of US policy that had limited the use of those mines to the Korean Peninsula.
In June 2022, the Biden administration reversed the anti-personnel mine decision, but provided them to Ukraine a year and a half later despite its own policy.
The United States is not signatory to an international treaty prohibiting the use of cluster weapons, just as it has never acceded to a similar treaty banning the use of anti-personnel land mines.
The United States has spent about $182 million on helping Ukraine deal with dud Russian weapons since the full-scale invasion of that country in February 2022.
Much of that money passed through the US Agency for International Development, which Elon Musk, empowered by Trump, has set out to destroy.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times
