The White House on Wednesday forcefully denied an Israeli media report claiming the United States was planning to establish a major military base in Israel near the Gaza border to support international forces enforcing the ceasefire there.

“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,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters during a briefing, referring to the report originally published by Ynet on Tuesday.

Leavitt said she personally confirmed with senior officials that no such plan exists.

“I checked with the highest levels of the United States federal government. This is not something the United States is interested in being engaged in,” she said. “Sometimes we see reporters take a piece of paper like this and just deem it as official policy, and sometimes that misleads people a little bit.”

The Ynet report had claimed Washington was preparing to build a large-scale base for use by international forces tasked with operating inside Gaza to monitor and maintain the ceasefire. The article did not cite specific U.S. officials but pointed to what it described as a Defense Department document outlining a preliminary site inquiry.

The Trump administration has sought to keep American troops out of direct operations inside Gaza, focusing instead on diplomatic coordination with Israel, Egypt, and regional partners to stabilize the enclave following months of conflict.

The Pentagon has not issued its own statement regarding the report, but a senior U.S. official familiar with the matter confirmed that any internal queries within the Department of the Navy were “informal and exploratory” and did not represent a policy decision.

The administration’s position is clear, Leavitt said: “The United States is not planning, proposing, or preparing to build a military base in Israel.”

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)