A suggestion by President Trump to “clean up” the Gaza Strip and ask Egypt and Jordan to bypass more Palestinians raised new questions Sunday about U.S. policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and two of its most important allies in the Middle East.
Mr Trump’s comments appeared to echo the wishes of Israelis on the far right that Palestinians would be encouraged to leave Gaza – an idea that goes to the heart of Palestinian fears that they would be driven from their remaining homeland, and which should be rejected by Egypt and Jordan.
“You’re probably talking about a million and a half people, and we’re cleaning all that up,” Mr. Trump said of Gaza on Saturday. “I don’t know. Something has to happen, but it’s literally a demolition site right now.”
Mr. Trump told reporters on Air Force One that he spoke to King Abdullah II about Jordan Now, and it’s a mess. »» He said he would also like Egypt to benefit from more Palestinians and that he would speak to the country’s president, Abdel Fattah El-Sissi.
He said the Palestinians could be in Jordan and Egypt “temporarily, or could be long term.”
It was unclear from Mr. Trump’s comments whether he was suggesting that all Gaza residents leave. The Enclave has a population of approximately two million people.
Mr. Trump’s suggestion was rejected on Sunday by Hamas, the militant group that runs Gaza.
“The Palestinian people of the Gaza Strip endured death and destruction over 15 months in one of humanity’s greatest crimes of the 21st century, simply to remain in their land and homeland,” Basem Naim said. , a member of the Hamas politburo, referring to the war that began with the Hamas-led attack on Israel in 2023. “Therefore, they will not accept any proposals or solutions, even if they are apparently well-intentioned below the cover of reconstruction, as proposed by US President Trump.”
But the idea appeared to be welcomed by Israeli politicians online.
Bezalel Smotrich, the far-right finance minister in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, issued a statement on X on Sunday that appeared to refer to Mr Trump’s comments, although he did not mention the US president.
“After 76 years during which most of Gaza’s population was forcibly detained in harsh conditions to maintain the ambition to destroy the State of Israel, the idea of helping them find other places to start a new life is a great idea,” he said.
Mr. Smotrich has long argued for helping Gazees who want to leave to leave and for the Israeli military to stay in the enclave to help pave the way for a possible Jewish settlement there.
Millions of Palestinian refugees already live in camps in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, while others now live in other Arab countries – including Egypt and the United Arab Emirates – and around the world. But the Palestinians and their Arab allies have long rejected any further resettlement outside the Palestinian territories, saying that forcing Palestinians to leave would mean erasing any hope of a future Palestinian state. Without land, they say, there is no country.
Virtually all Egyptians and Jordanians fervently support Palestinian aspirations for statehood, making it unlikely that either government would consent to such an arrangement.
Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said in a news conference on Sunday that Jordan’s “rejection of the move was fixed and immutable,” according to Sky News Arabia, in what appeared to be a reference to Mr. Trump. He added: “Jordan is for the Jordanians and Palestine is for the Palestinians.”
As of Sunday, there was no public response to Mr. Trump’s suggestion of Egypt.
“It would go completely against his base,” Maged Mandour, an Egyptian political analyst, said of the prospects of Egypt having large numbers of Palestinians. “It’s just a non-starter.”
Egypt also fears that the arrival of large numbers of Palestinians could threaten the country’s security. In particular, Cairo has long feared that embittered and impoverished Palestinian refugees, if allowed into Egypt, could launch attacks on Israel from Egyptian soil, drawing Israeli retaliation.
At the start of the war, Egypt became so concerned about the prospect of any move that would send the Gazans flooding into its territory that it warned Israel that it would endanger the Israel-Egypt peace treaty. decades old, an anchor of stability in the Middle East since 1979.
Jordan is already home to many Palestinians and many Jordanians of Palestinian origin. Accepting refugees from Gaza would risk destabilizer A population that has never resolved tensions resulting from the original influx of Palestinians, analysts say.
It is unclear whether Mr. Trump’s comment indicates a change in U.S. policy toward the Palestinians.
Under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and other recent presidents other than Mr. Trump, the United States officially supported the creation of a Palestinian state alongside an Israeli, criticizing Israeli extremist attempts to seize more of Palestinian land Jordan that they would not be obliged to consult more Palestinians.
But with Mr. Trump returning to the White House, all the assumptions that had endured about American relations in the Middle East may now be upended.
Both Egypt and Jordan are key U.S. partners in the region, and successive U.S. administrations have viewed their stability as crucial to that of the broader Middle East. They both receive significant US funding, with Egypt the second largest recipient of foreign aid after Israel.
The Trump administration on Friday issued a memo suddenly freezing all foreign aid for a 90-day reevaluation period, but outlined two major exceptions: arms support to Israel and Egypt. The same day, in another sign of Mr. Trump’s support for Israel, the White House told the Pentagon to proceed with a 2,000-pound bomb shipment to Israel that Mr. Biden abruptly stopped last summer for discourage the Israeli army from destroying much destroying much destroying much property in the city of Gazan of Rafah. Israeli forces bombarded the city anyway.
It is unclear whether Mr. Trump would try to use the $1.3 billion that Egypt is supposed to receive in annual aid as leverage to try to force it to accept more Palestinian refugees.
Fear of being driven out of Gaza runs deep among Palestinians, who dismiss it as a replay of what they call the Nakba – or “catastrophe” in Arabic – the mass displacement of Palestinians from their homes in 1948 during the war surrounding the creation of Israel as a state.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza are trying to return home as the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel enters the second week. This is only the second pause in fighting between the two since October 7, 2023, when Hamas carried out an attack on Israel that killed more than 1,200 Israelis. Since then, the Israeli army has killed at least 46,000 Palestinians, according to Gazan health officials, who do not distinguish between fighters and civilians. It also destroyed thousands of homes and buildings in Gaza and killed many Hamas leaders.
Most of Gaza’s two million Palestinians have had to flee their homes at least once. And although aid has recently increased, the humanitarian situation remains dire, with water, food and medicine running low and few working hospitals.
Noura al-Awad, 29, and her family were among those who remained in their homes in Gaza City for the past 15 months, persisting through airstrikes, a ground invasion and almost family-like conditions because they were determined not to cede their land in Israel, she said in a telephone interview Sunday.
She vowed to survive Mr. Trump’s plans, too.
“For a year and three months we were attacked from all sides, we were starved and humiliated, we experienced killings, death and destruction, but we did not move south,” she declared. “No way,” she would leave, she said.
The reports were provided by Andrés R. Martínez, Iyad Abuheweila, Isabel Kershner And Rania Khaled.
