U.S. Rejects Reports of Planned $500 Million Gaza Border Base

The U.S. on Wednesday firmly denied reports that it intends to build a $500-million base near the Gaza border, stressing that Washington has no plans to deploy American forces to the area as part of efforts to support the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.

U.S. Central Command issued the clarification a day after Shomrim published what it described as details from a preliminary document suggesting the Pentagon was preparing to build a base on the border to assist in Gaza’s postwar stabilization. Additional Israeli outlets later reported that the proposed facility would host as many as 10,000 people, including U.S. troops.

CENTCOM spokesman Captain Tim Hawkins rejected the claims outright. “Reports of the establishment of a U.S. military base near Gaza are inaccurate,” he said in a statement. “To be clear, no U.S. troops will be deployed into Gaza. Any reporting to the contrary is false.”

The White House echoed the denial during a press briefing on Tuesday, where spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt addressed the reports directly. She said she had spoken with the journalist behind the original article and found that the story was built around a single inquiry from a Department of the Navy office, not an approved plan. “This article was based on a single piece of paper, an inquiry that somebody in the Department of Navy made about an idea that may happen in the future, and this reporter deemed that as an official plan and ran with a story that the United States is looking into it,” Leavitt said.

Leavitt added that she had checked “with the highest levels of the United States federal government,” and emphasized that the idea was not under consideration. “This is not something the United States is interested in being engaged in. It’s not something we are currently involved in right now that we will be funding.”

She reiterated President Donald Trump’s position on avoiding military entanglement. “The president has been very clear. He doesn’t want to see boots on the ground with respect to what’s happening in the Middle East,” she said, adding that Washington wants to preserve the progress made under the Gaza ceasefire framework.

The U.S. currently has about 200 troops in Israel as part of the Civil-Military Coordination Center, a mechanism created to help move humanitarian and security assistance into Gaza and to monitor the ceasefire. Leavitt suggested the mistaken reports highlighted how “sometimes we see reporters take a piece of paper like this and just deem it as official policy.”