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Donald Trump called on Egypt and Jordan to take in the majority of Gaza’s population, saying it was time to “cleanse” the territory in comments likely to enrage Palestinians and Arabs across the region.
“I would like Egypt to receive people. And I would like Jordan to take the people,” the US president told reporters aboard Air Force One. “You’re talking about a million and a half people, and we’re just cleaning the whole thing.”
Trump’s proposal would reverse decades of US policy of promoting a two-state solution based on the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, in Gaza and parts of the occupied West Bank.
Trump said he had already discussed his proposal to resettle Gaza’s population with Jordan’s King Abdullah on Saturday and would bring it up in a telephone conversation with Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Egypt’s president, on Sunday.
With a cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas entering its second week, Trump said Gaza was “literally a place of demolition, almost everything is demolished and people are dying there so I’d rather get involved with some Arab nations and build houses somewhere else where might be able to live in peace for a change”.
Trump said the population relocation “could be temporary or long-term.” The pre-war population of Gaza was 2.2 million.
Amman and Cairo have repeatedly rejected any transfer of Palestinians to their territories since the war began in October 2023, saying it would mean “liquidating the Palestinian cause” at the expense of Israel’s neighbors.
Sisi has previously said that admitting Gazans would jeopardize Egypt’s peace deal with Israel because of the risk that some of them would continue to fight against the Jewish state within Egypt’s borders.
HA Hellyer, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington, said such a transfer “could be deeply destabilizing, particularly for Jordan (which already has a large Palestinian population) and potentially for Egypt to move Palestinians to Sinai, for example, because it could mean a conflict between Palestinian militants and Israel”.
The two countries have weak economies and need US support, but their leaders would not want to be seen as complicit in what Arab public opinion would consider a second “Nakba” or catastrophe – the exodus to neighboring countries of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees in 1948. when the state of Israel was founded.
“That would enrage the Arabs because the historical record is very clear; “Every time the Palestinians were forced to leave a part of Palestine, they never came back,” Hellyer said. “Emptying Gaza of its inhabitants would not have any support from the Arabs, or even internationally, because it is the definition of ethnic cleansing.”
Such a move, he added, would undermine prospects for normalizing relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia — long at the center of American diplomatic efforts in the region. “That would make it even more unlikely that a deal would happen in the immediate future,” Hellyer said.
Trump’s proposal for Gaza nevertheless excited the leaders of the Israeli far right.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich described Trump’s proposal as a “wonderful idea,” adding that “only thinking outside the box about new solutions will bring . . . peace and security.”
Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s former national security minister who resigned last week in protest over the Gaza ceasefire agreement, “praised” Trump for bringing up the idea.
Trump also confirmed that the Pentagon has lifted a freeze on deliveries of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel imposed by the Biden administration. “We released them today and they will have them,” he said. “They paid for them and they waited a long time.”
The ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas was already under pressure despite Saturday’s successful release of four Israeli soldiers from captivity in Gaza and 200 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails.
Israeli officials said over the weekend that Hamas violated a US-brokered deal after it failed to release the last female civilian hostage believed to be alive – Arbel Yehud – before the soldiers.
Mediators have been working behind the scenes to find a solution for Yehud’s release, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said until the matter was “sorted out” it would not allow hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians to return to the northern Gaza Strip, as requested. in agreement.
Israel’s ceasefire with Lebanon also appeared in jeopardy, with Israel making clear late last week that it would not meet a two-month deadline to withdraw its forces from southern Lebanon on Sunday.
Additional reporting by Sarah Dadouch in Beirut
