Palestinian refugees are being allowed to reenter areas of Gaza amid a ceasefire between Israel and the terrorist group Hamas as White House officials are considering a plan to move them somewhere safer.
Israel allowed access to northern parts of the Gaza Strip on Monday in accordance with the recent peace deal, allowing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to return home.
Trump told reporters Saturday on Air Force One that he would prefer to “just clean out” the Gaza Strip and resettle refugees elsewhere in the surrounding region — but regional powers are not thrilled with that idea.
“I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing at a different location where they can maybe live in peace for a change,” the president said.
Trump told reporters that he had spoken with King Abdullah II of Jordan and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi about the prospect of the two countries absorbing the displaced populations.
“I said to [King Abdullah], ‘I’d love you to take on more, because I’m looking at the whole Gaza Strip right now, and it’s a mess,’” Trump said. “I’d like him to take people. I’d like Egypt to take people.”
Those conversations do not seem to have convinced Jordanian or Egyptian leaders.
Ayman Safadi, the foreign minister of Jordan, rebuked Trump’s suggestion — claiming that Palestinians’ future must remain on Palestinian territory.
“Palestine is for the Palestinians and Jordan is for the Jordanians and … the solution to the Palestinian problem is located on Palestinian soil and embodied by a Palestinian state,” Safadi said.
The Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs released a statement Sunday that conveyed “continued support for the steadfastness of the Palestinian people on their land and their adherence to their legitimate rights in their land and homeland, as well as to the principles of international law and international humanitarian law.”
The ministry also promised to reject “any infringement upon those inalienable rights, whether through settlement activities, annexation of land, or the eviction of the rightful owners through displacement or encouraging the transfer or uprooting of Palestinians from their land, whether temporarily or permanently.”
Critics of Israel contend that removing Palestinians from their territory would allow the total annexation of Palestinian lands and the permanent end of residents’ struggle to stay on the ancestral soil.
Trump’s suggestion caused outrage at the United Nations, where Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese called the removal of Palestinians from Gaza a form of “ethnic cleansing” and “illegal, immoral, and irresponsible.”
The terrorist leadership in control of the Gaza Strip is equally uninterested in a mass exodus.
Senior Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri has rejected the proposal, saying that the people of Gaza “endured death in order not to leave the homeland and will not leave it for any other reasons.”
Many Palestinians returning to Gaza this week have been living in poor conditions for over a year since fleeing the conflict sparked by the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks.
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Hamas remains in control of the area but hostilities have ceased under the current agreement, negotiated by the United States with help from Qatari mediators.
Israeli hostages are being released in exchange for Palestinians taken prisoner by the Israeli military as part of the first phase of the ceasefire deal.