BBC News, Jerusalem
ReutersUS President Donald Trump said he wants Egypt and Jordan to take Palestinians from Gaza.
Trump said he made a request to Jordan’s King Abdullah and plans to ask the Egyptian president on Sunday.
Describing Gaza as a “demolition center”, Trump said: “You’re talking about a million and a half people, and we just clean that whole thing”. He added that the move “could be temporary” or “take a long time”.
This comment may have angered the Palestinians in Gaza, their home. Both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority have condemned the proposal. Jordan’s foreign minister said the regime was “firm and unwavering” in its refusal to expel the Palestinians.
A ceasefire is observed in Gaza after the agreement between Israel and Hamas to stop the war that started when Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023. About 1,200 people were killed and 251 were returned to Gaza as hostages.
More than 47,200 Palestinians, most of them civilians, have been killed during the Israeli attack, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry.
Most of Gaza’s two million residents have been displaced in the past 15 months of war, which has destroyed much of Gaza’s infrastructure.
The United Nations has estimated that 60% of buildings across Gaza have been damaged or destroyed, and it could take decades to rebuild.
Trump made his comments while speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One.
“Almost everything is destroyed and people die there.
“So I would like to get involved with other Arab nations and build houses in a different place where they can live in peace for a change.”
Trump did not provide further details about the proposal, and the topic was not mentioned in the White House’s official reading of the call.
EPA“Our Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip endured death and destruction for 15 months … without leaving their land. Therefore, they will not accept any offers or solutions, even if they seem to be good intentions under the heading of reconstruction, as announced by the US. Proposals of President Trump,” Bassem Naim, a member of the Hamas political office, told the BBC.
“Our people, just as they have thwarted all immigration and foreign policy in the past decades, will thwart this project,” he added.
In the West Bank, Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas “expressed his strong rejection and condemnation of any activities aimed at evicting our people from the Gaza Strip”.
Asked about Trump’s comments, Abu Yahya Rashid, a man who was expelled from the southern city of Khan Younis said:
“We are the ones who decide our destiny and what we want. This land is ours and it belongs to our ancestors throughout history. We will not leave it without dead bodies.”
Decades of US foreign policy have been committed to the creation of a Palestinian state, with Gaza as an integral part. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu he refuses this.
Donald Trump has a long history of seemingly speaking off the cuff and floating ideas that never quite pan out.
However, the idea of encouraging Gazans to migrate to neighboring countries has long been promoted by hardline members of the Netanyahu government.
Former national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir of the Jewish Power group said he praised Trump “for the move to transfer citizens from Gaza to Jordan and Egypt”.
“One of our demands from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is to encourage voluntary migration,” he wrote in X.
Israel’s finance minister, Bezelal Smotrich, has also said that Palestinians must move to neighboring countries to allow the establishment of Jewish settlements in Gaza.
Such comments anger the Palestinian people and will dishearten supporters of the “two-state solution” – the establishment of an independent Palestinian State alongside Israel.
There is a fear among Palestinians that those close to President Trump are pushing him too far when it comes to Middle East policy.
This month, Trump’s nominee to be the next US ambassador to Israel, evangelical Mike Huckabee, rejected the idea of a Palestinian state.
“The Palestinians got an opportunity in Gaza,” he said in an American television interview.
“Then look what happened there.”
Gaza has been under Israeli occupation since 1967.
Huckabee’s comments contradict six decades of US policy in the Middle East where Washington has long pushed the idea of a “two-state solution”.
The US has previously stated that it opposes any expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza or the occupied West Bank.
More than two million Palestinian refugees, most of whom have been granted citizenship, live in Jordan, according to the UN. They are the descendants of some 750,000 Palestinians who fled or were forced from their homes in the conflicts surrounding the creation of Israel in 1948.
Thousands of Palestinians have fled to Egypt since the war with Israel began, but they are not known there as refugees.
In October 2023, Egyptian President Adel Fattah al-Sisi said he rejected any forced displacement of Palestinians into the Sinai Peninsula, and that the only solution was an independent Palestinian state.
Some on the right in Israel want to return to Gaza and set up dwellings there. Israel ordered a unilateral withdrawal in 2005, dismantling 21 settlements and demobilizing some 9,000 soldiers.
Trump’s comments came as follows displaced people are delayed in returning to their homes in northern Gaza after Israel accused Hamas of violating the terms of the ceasefire agreement.
“There is nothing there – no life, everything is destroyed. But to return to your country, to your home is a great joy,” one man who was waiting anxiously told the BBC.
In separate remarks about Air Force One, Trump said he was done being President Joe Biden was involved in giving 2,000-pound bombs to Israel.
“They paid for them and they’ve been waiting for them,” he told reporters on Air Force One.
The US is Israel’s biggest arms supplier, having helped build one of the most technologically advanced armies in the world.
But the war in Gaza led to renewed calls for the US to reduce or end arms exports to Israel, due to the level of destruction caused by US weapons in the region.
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