Agencies
Washington
United States President Donald Trump says he would like to “just clean out” Gaza, urging Egypt and Jordan to take in more Palestinians from the coastal enclave.
Speaking with reporters on board Air Force One on Saturday, Trump said he had a call earlier in the day with King Abdullah II of Jordan and would speak with Egypt President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi later on Sunday.
“I would like Egypt to take people,” Trump said. “You’re talking about probably a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing and say: ‘You know, it’s over.’”
Trump said he complimented Jordan for having successfully accepted Palestinian refugees and that he told the king, “I would love for you to take on more, ‘cause I am looking at the whole Gaza Strip right now, and it’s a mess. It’s a real mess.”
Israel’s genocide in Gaza displaced almost the entire 2.3 million people in Gaza, some of them multiple times. Trump said Gaza’s inhabitants could be moved “temporarily or could be long term”.
“It is literally a demolition site right now, almost everything is demolished and people are dying there,” he said. “So, I would rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing in a different location, where they can maybe live in peace for a change.”
Jordan’s Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi, who met with United Nations Senior Humanitarian and Reconstruction Coordinator for Gaza Sigrid Kaag on Sunday, emphasised that “our position is that the two-state solution is the way to achieve peace”.
He also stressed that Jordan’s “rejection of displacement is fixed and unchangeable” in an apparent veiled response to Trump. Safadi said Jordan looks forward to working with the Trump administration and will support peace efforts across the region, according to the Jordanian Foreign Ministry.
The Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) condemned the US president’s suggestion, calling it an encouragement of “war crimes”. Describing Trump’s idea as “deplorable”, the group, which has fought a war with Israel alongside Hamas until last week’s ceasefire, said his “proposal falls within the framework of encouraging war crimes and crimes against humanity by forcing our people to leave their land”.
It also said Trump’s statement was “in line with the worst of the agenda of the extreme Zionist right and a continuation of the policy of denying the existence of the Palestinian people, their will and their rights” and called on Egypt and Jordan to reject his plan. For Palestinians, any attempt to move them from Gaza would evoke dark memories of what they call the “Nakba” or catastrophe – the mass displacement of Palestinians during Israel’s creation in 1948.
Egypt has previously warned against any “forced displacement” of Palestinians from Gaza into the Sinai desert, which el-Sisi said could jeopardise the peace treaty Egypt signed with Israel in 1979. Jordan is already home to around 2.3 million registered Palestinian refugees, according to the United Nations.
