Almost exactly two years ago, J. D. Vance wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal endorsing Donald Trump on the grounds that Trump was antiwar. In that op-ed, Vance brought up the Abraham Accords between Israel, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates in a way that suggested that, by brokering that deal, Trump had brought peace to the Middle East.

Yesterday Trump held a press conference with the most notorious war criminal on the planet. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu just spent fifteen months reducing Gaza to rubble. Twenty-five miles long and six miles wide, the Gaza Strip now has the world’s largest population of child amputees. The scale of civilian death there, even in absolute terms, has dwarfed recent wars fought in places with vastly larger populations, like Iraq and Ukraine. As Netanyahu grinned from ear to ear, Trump laid out a plan for the United States to step in and finish the job.

The United States, Trump said, should “take over” Gaza. “We’ll own it.” Its entire population of around two million Palestinians would leave. The United States would raze all the destroyed buildings, “level it out,” and rebuild the territory from scratch as the “Riviera of the Middle East.” When pressed by reporters about whether Palestinians would be allowed to come back after the rebuilding was done, Trump asked, “Why would they want to return? That place has been hell.”

As the man who turned it into hell sat smiling beside him, Trump answered follow-up questions. Where would these millions of permanently displaced residents live out the rest of their lives? It was his “hope,” he said, that “we could do something really nice, really good, where they wouldn’t want to return.” The destination for this permanent exile “could be Jordan, it could be Egypt, it could be other countries.” They wouldn’t all have to go to the same place. They could be dispersed between “four or five or six areas . . . it doesn’t have to be one area.” Anyway, “Who would want to go back? They’ve experienced nothing but death and destruction.”

I’ve seen some grassroots Trump supporters claim that it’s inconsistent for the Palestinians and their advocates in the West to simultaneously oppose ethnically cleansing the territory of its millions of Palestinians and insist that Israel has treated Gaza as an open-air prison. If it’s a prison, they’ll say, surely it’s no bad thing to be shown the door. But this is willfully obtuse. It’s true that Gazans have long been confined to that twenty-five-mile strip of land, that Israel has tightly controlled the territory’s air, land, and sea borders, that Gazans aren’t even allowed to visit other parts of their homeland, and that Gaza residents have even been shot to death for simply coming too close to the border fence. All of this does indeed add up to being very prisonlike. But there’s no inconsistency here. If an authoritarian regime keeps a dissident under house arrest in his family home, that’s a human rights violation. If the regime demolishes the home and forces the dissident and his family to seek shelter elsewhere, that’s also a human rights violation. And no one anywhere would be confused about how both could be true.

In summary, yes, Trump’s plan amounts to a human rights violation. And yes, given Palestinians’ opposition to leaving and Arab nations’ support for their cause, it could only be accomplished by more war, whether or not that war is simply economically underwritten and armed by the United States or actually carried out by American troops. So much for Trump’s antiwar credentials.

As he sat with Netanyahu, Trump didn’t spell out whether the Israeli army would be in charge of forcing Gaza’s two million civilians to permanently leave their homes, or if the US military would do that part after taking ownership of the territory. Either way, history suggests that civilians who have endured decades of occupation, blockade, and displacement would not leave willingly. The presence of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis makes such forced displacement even more untenable. The notion that refugee camps that are “really nice, really good” would pacify these resistance forces ignores the deeply rooted nature of the Palestinian nationalist cause.

Trump said he sees “a long-term ownership position” for the United States in Gaza and claimed that “everybody I’ve spoken to loves the idea of the United States owning that piece of land, developing and creating thousands of jobs with something that will be magnificent.” If that’s true, that says some pretty astonishing things about who has the ear of the president of the United States.

When Trump first ran for president in 2016, he made great hay of retroactively opposing the war in Iraq (although fact-checkers kept telling anyone who would listen that Trump had actually supported the invasion in 2002). He was supposed to be an “America First” isolationist who didn’t want to drag the United States into new wars in the Middle East. Now he’s peddling a scenario that, if it ever comes true, would threaten complete regional destabilization and inaugurate a bloodier and longer-lasting war in the Middle East than the ones that George W. Bush started after 9/11.

Don’t let anyone ever tell you this man is antiwar.