According to US media reports, the administration of US President Donald Trump is considering a plan for the United States to lead the occupation and administration of the besieged Gaza Strip, similar to the way Washington administered Iraq after the 2003 US invasion.

Reuters reported that high-level discussions "focused on forming a transitional government headed by a US official, which would oversee Gaza until it is demilitarized and stabilized, and a viable Palestinian administration emerges."

The sources, who spoke to the agency on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the talks publicly, compared the proposal to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq that Washington established in 2003, shortly after the US-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.

Anil Shelin, a scholar at the Quincy Institute in Washington, D.C., described the idea as "horrific and absurd," adding, "Americans should remember the futility of imposing a government on Iraq by force of arms. Trump's apparent consideration of this shows how much he is subservient to Israel's control, rather than prioritizing U.S. interests."

Most experts point to the CPA as the catalyst for an imminent insurgency that plunged the US military into more than a decade of war in Iraq, which has killed hundreds of thousands and cost more than $3 trillion. As with the US-led war in Iraq, experts say that "there would be no set timetable for how long such a US-led administration would remain [in Gaza]," while "a US-led interim authority in Gaza would drag Washington deeper into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and represent its largest intervention in the Middle East since the invasion of Iraq."

"If true, it's a complete reversal of the Bush administration's policies regarding the occupation of Middle Eastern territories," added Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute. "It's the opposite of what Trump promised the American people: bringing the troops home and disengaging the United States from the region."

"It also shows that as long as Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories, which is the root cause of the violence, continues, the United States will always face pressure to withdraw from the Middle East," Parsi added.

Last year, the hardline neoconservative think tank, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), and the Vandenberg coalition released a plan—with similar lines to what Reuters reported—that called for the creation of a special entity, the "International Fund for Gaza Relief and Reconstruction," led by "a group of Arab states such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates" and "supported by the United States and other countries."