JERUSALEM — President Donald Trump’s plan to place the Gaza Strip under U.S. occupation and transfer its nearly 2 million Palestinian residents has delighted the Israeli right, horrified Palestinians, shocked America’s Arab allies and confounded regional analysts who saw it as unworkable.

For some experts, the idea felt so unlikely — Would Trump really risk U.S. troops in another intractable battle against militant Islamists in the Middle East? — that they wondered if it was simply the opening bid in a new round of negotiations over Gaza’s future.

To the Israeli right, Trump’s plan unraveled decades of unwelcome orthodoxy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, raising the possibility of negating the militant threat in Gaza without the need to create a Palestinian state. In particular, settler leaders hailed it as a route by which they might ultimately resettle Gaza with Jewish civilians — a long-held desire.

To Palestinians, the proposal would constitute ethnic cleansing on a more terrifying scale than any displacement they have experienced since 1948, when roughly 800,000 Arabs were expelled or fled during the wars surrounding the creation of the Jewish state.

“Outrageous,” said professor Mkhaimar Abusada, a Palestinian political analyst from Gaza who was displaced from his home during the war. “Palestinians would rather live in tents next to their destroyed homes rather than relocate to another place.”

“Very important,” wrote Itamar Ben-Gvir, a far-right Israeli lawmaker and settler leader, in a social media post. “The only solution to Gaza is to encourage the migration of Gazans.”

While Trump portrayed the idea as a kindness to Palestinians living in a decimated territory, legal experts said that forced deportation would be a crime against humanity.

Past population transfers on this scale have often exacerbated social and political problems instead of solving them, and caused extreme hardship for the people forced from their homes. The displacement of roughly 20 million people during the partition of India in 1947, for example, had political consequences that lasted for decades and contributed to several conflicts.

Just as Trump has often made bold threats elsewhere that he has not enacted, some saw his gambit in Gaza as a negotiating tactic aimed at forcing compromises from both Hamas and from Arab leaders.

In the Gaza Strip, Hamas has yet to agree to fully cede power, a position that makes the Israeli government less likely to extend the ceasefire. Elsewhere in the region, Saudi Arabia is refusing to normalize ties with Israel, or help with Gaza’s postwar governance, unless Israel agrees to the creation of a Palestinian state.

Trump’s maximalist plans may have been an attempt to get both Hamas and Saudi Arabia to shift their positions, Israeli and Palestinian analysts said.

Faced with a choice between preserving its own control over Gaza and maintaining a Palestinian presence there, Hamas might perhaps settle for the latter, said Michael Milshtein, an Israeli analyst of Palestinian affairs.

And Saudi Arabia is being prodded to give up its insistence on Palestinian statehood and settle instead for a deal that preserves Palestinians’ right to stay in Gaza but not their right to sovereignty, Abusada said.

Saudi Arabia rejected Trump’s plan Wednesday, issuing a statement that underlined its support for Palestinian statehood. But some still think the Saudi position could change. During Trump’s previous tenure, in 2020, the United Arab Emirates made a similar compromise when it agreed to normalize ties with Israel in exchange for the postponement of Israel’s annexation of the West Bank.

In turn, Trump has given the Israeli right a reason to support an extension of the ceasefire, Israeli analysts said.

For more than a year, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing allies have threatened to collapse his coalition if the war ends with Hamas still in power. Now, those hard-liners have an off-ramp — a pledge from Israel’s biggest ally to empty Gaza of Palestinians at some point in the future, an idea that Israel has pushed since the start of the war.

Within the Israeli mainstream, however, Trump’s announcement prompted unease amid concern that it might provoke Hamas into ending the ceasefire early. Relatives of hostages held in Gaza avoided direct criticism of the plan but implored him to focus first on persuading Israel and Hamas to extend the truce.