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Donald Trump has urged Egypt and Jordan to take in most of the population of Gaza, saying it was time to “clean out” the territory in comments that are likely to outrage Palestinians and Arabs across the region.
“I’d like Egypt to take people. And I’d like Jordan to take people,” the US president told reporters aboard Air Force One. “You’re talking about a million and half people, and we just clean out that whole thing.”
Trump’s proposal would upend decades of US policy promoting the 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 has already discussed his proposal to relocate Gaza’s population with King Abdullah of Jordan on Saturday and will bring it up on Sunday in a phone call with Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Egypt’s president.
With the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas entering its second week, Trump said Gaza was “literally a demolition site, almost everything is demolished and people are dying there so 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”.
Trump said a population transfer “could be temporarily or could be long term”. The prewar population of Gaza was 2.2mn.
Amman and Cairo have since the start of the war in October 2023 repeatedly rejected any transfer of Palestinians to their territories, saying it would amount to the “liquidation of the Palestinian cause” at the expense of Israel’s neighbours.
Sisi has said previously that taking in Gazans would threaten Egypt’s peace agreement with Israel because of the risk that some of them would resume fighting the Jewish state from within Egypt’s borders.
H.A. Hellyer, senior fellow at Center for American Progress in Washington, said such a transfer “could be deeply destabilising particularly for Jordan [which already has a large Palestinian population] and potentially for Egypt to relocate Palestinians to the Sinai for example because it could mean 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 to be complicit in what Arab public opinion would consider a second “Nakba” or catastrophe — the exodus to neighbouring countries of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees in 1948 when the state of Israel was founded.
“It would outrage Arabs because the historical record is very clear; every time Palestinians have been forced to leave part of Palestine, they never went back,” said Hellyer. “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 of a normalisation of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia — long a focus of US diplomatic efforts in the region. “It would make it even more unlikely the deal would take place in the immediate future,” said Hellyer.
Trump’s Gaza proposal nonetheless delighted leaders of Israel’s far-right.
Finance minister Bezalel Smotrich described Trump’s suggestion as a “wonderful idea”, adding that “only outside-the-box thinking over new solutions will bring . . . peace and security”.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, the former Israeli national security minister who resigned in protest last week over the Gaza ceasefire deal, “praised” Trump for floating the idea.
Trump also confirmed that the Pentagon had lifted a hold on the delivery 2,000-pound bombs to Israel imposed by the Biden administration. “We released them today and they’ll have them,” he said. “They paid for them and they have been waiting for them for a long time.”
The ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas was already under strain despite the successful release on Saturday of four female Israeli soldiers from captivity in Gaza and 200 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails.
Israeli officials said over the weekend that Hamas had violated the US-brokered accord after it failed to release the last civilian woman hostage still believed to be alive — Arbel Yehud — before the soldiers.
Mediators were working behind the scenes to find a solution for Yehud’s release, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said that until the matter was “put in order” it would not allow hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians to return to northern Gaza, as called for in the deal.
Israel’s ceasefire with Lebanon also appeared in danger, with Israel making it clear late last week that it would not meet the two month deadline for the withdrawal of its forces from southern Lebanon on Sunday.
Additional reporting by Sarah Dadouch in Beirut
