Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s team is trying to finalize plans to create a safe haven where Palestinian civilians in Gaza can receive humanitarian aid, but the presence of Hamas terrorists remains a major impediment.
“The concern the Israeli government has ... is that any assistance that goes in will be diverted once it's inside Gaza,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said Thursday. “We think that's a legitimate concern.”
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The humanitarian crisis attendant to Israel’s war against Hamas, a conflict ignited by the terrorist organization’s Oct. 7 rampage across southern Israel, was a major priority for Blinken during his whirlwind tour of the Middle East over the last week. And while the conflict has exacerbated diplomatic tensions between Israel and leading Arab powers, U.S. efforts to mitigate the crisis have been complicated by the fact that neither Israel nor its neighboring Arab states are willing to admit Palestinian refugees.
“Transferring the refugees, the Palestinian citizens, from the strip to Sinai would simply be transferring their resistance, the fighting, from the Gaza Strip to Sinai,” Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el Sisi said Wednesday, according to a translation from an Egyptian media outlet. “Egypt would bear the consequences of that. Sinai would become a base for terrorist operations against Israel, and we, in Egypt, would bear the responsibility for that.”
Jordanian King Abdullah II likewise has drawn a public “red line” that “there will be no refugees in Jordan and no refugees in Egypt.” Sisi and his Jordanian counterpart have justified that policy as a means of ensuring that Palestinian civilians retain a prospect for the second part of the elusive “two-state solution,” but Sisi also added a wry note to that argument in his public statement.
“If there is a proposal to displace Palestinians, Israel has the Negev desert and can transfer Palestinians there until it finishes its mission of eliminating resistance factions or armed groups, including Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and others, then move them back [to the strip] if it wants,” Sisi said. “But moving them to Egypt? Such a military operation is very loose and can last for years.”
The Jordanians, for their part, fought a war to expel the Palestinian Liberation Organization after the Six-Day War in 1967 spurred about 300,000 Palestinian refugees to enter the country.
“The Jordanian monarchy believed, and probably rightly, that the PLO was looking to overthrow the Jordanian monarchy, and, you know, in effect turn Jordan into a Palestinian state,” American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Kenneth Pollack said. “There are very serious tensions between the Jordanian Palestinians and what are called the East Bankers [of Jordan who] tend to support the monarchy far more strongly than the Palestinians, who, you know, tend to regard it as … an unnecessary evil. They'd love to get rid of it.”
Miller sidestepped Sisi’s suggestion about the Negev. “One of the things that we heard in our travels around the region … is that the idea of Palestinians leaving Gaza was a nonstarter,” he said. "They did not want to see Palestinians leaving Palestinian land. That’s one of the reasons why we focused on setting up areas inside Gaza where they can be safe from harm.”
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That still leaves the dilemma of how to provide for those civilians without making the supplies available to Hamas.
“The people with guns inside Gaza are Hamas. And so Hamas may try to divert this assistance and keep it from getting to the civilians who it is intended for,” Miller said. "We are working on the mechanisms for the delivery of this assistance.”